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Noah Rothman’s new book Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America landed this month as a much-needed corrective to the comfortable story line peddled by elites who insist that political violence is chiefly a right-wing problem. Rothman, a senior writer with National Review, lays out a sweeping narrative showing that left-wing political violence has deep roots and modern iterations that cannot be wished away.
Rothman took his case onto the conservative airwaves this week, appearing with Stu Burguiere and Dave Landau to walk through the book’s hard lessons and the policy steps that follow. Conservative audiences should be grateful the conversation is happening where real Americans listen, because the mainstream media will never highlight inconvenient truths about the left’s violent history.
The book reads like a map of the left’s recurrent fury, tracing anarchists, labor radicals, the New Left’s violent fringe, and post-1990s agitators into today’s chaotic political moment. Rothman’s research compels the listener to admit what plenty of honest observers already know: violence on the left is not an aberration but a recurring pattern that modern elites too often rationalize away.
Rothman does not merely fling accusations; he documents episodes and shows how sympathetic journalists, academics, and political figures have at times built a permission structure that blurs moral lines. That historical work — from the Galleanists and Weather Underground to modern antifa tactics and campus mobs — is uncomfortable for people who profit from pretending those connections do not exist.
Conservatives should not respond with hysteria, but with steady, commonsense policy: enforce the law evenhandedly, defend free speech while refusing to grant sanctimony to violence, and stop letting partisan institutions sanitize or excuse thuggery when it advances fashionable causes. Rothman’s point that we already possess many of the tools to confront this problem is one the right should seize as a call to practical action rather than a pretext for culture-war melodrama.
If there is one lesson for patriotic Americans, it is that truth matters more than reputation. The left’s useful narratives about victimhood and moral superiority are not an excuse to ignore the darker chapters of their own movement; confronting those chapters honestly protects civil society and the rule of law. No serious defense of liberty can tolerate selective memory when lives and institutions are at stake.
Listen to Rothman’s conversation with Stu and Dave, read the book, and pass both along to friends who still think political violence is a one-sided threat. This is the kind of wake-up call conservatives have been waiting for: clear-eyed, well-documented, and unapologetically aimed at protecting the America our children deserve.
