Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Dangerous.
Laughter.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Laughter.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Dangerous.
Dangerous. Lefter.
[00:00:10] Speaker C: Laughter.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Dangerous Laughter.
Danger.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Laughter.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Sam.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: The emergency destruct system is now activated.
The option to override detonation procedure has now expired.
The ship will automatically destruct in E minus one minute.
[00:01:36] Speaker D: And we are back on another episode of Dangerous laughter. I am A.J. rice. Remember, our job here is to transform horror into humor. My next dangerous guest is like kryptonite to the new Puritans.
Now the new Puritans try to suck all joy out of. Out of your life. And this, this author knows a little bit about that. He is a senior writer for National Review. A Seton hall pirate. We love Seton Hall. He's actually more important to the state of New Jersey than both Springsteen and Bon Jovi and Chris Christie.
Maybe not Sinatra, but, but definitely Springsteen. He is the author of a brand new book, Blood in Progress. A Century of Left Wing Violence. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the pride of Voorhees High School, Noah Rothman, ladies and gentlemen. There he is. There he is.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: I'm great. All of that. That introduction was indisputable. Absolutely nothing there is factually unsupported. You okay?
[00:02:41] Speaker D: I want to check. What is it? Snopes or one of these other things? Come fact check me later for sure. So we've got a brand new book. This is your third book.
I gotta tell. I gotta tell the audience. When I was writing and then released the Woking Dead in 2022, Noah's first book, which I have in front of me too. The Rise of the New Puritans is indispensable for pushing back on the Fun police, pushing back on the. The Joyless Cat Ladies with Taylor Swift playing in the background. Advance was talking about.
But we got a new book here, Blood in Progress, A Century of Left Wing Violence. You know, it's funny. It's a century of left wing violence now. And I think this has probably been done. You could go into, you know, the. The Grant administration. You could go all the way back, all the way back to John Wilkes Booth and come all the way forward. But you decided to do a century. What I want to know is, because, look, when I was writing the Walking Dead, I mean, all three of my books are about wokeism. I tend to concentrate on the Long March and the sort of Antonio Gramsey esque cultural Marxism and then the infection of, you know, early radio and the silent picture industry and the. And the, you know, public sector unions and things like that.
What's funny is that although I focused on that, basically what you have done here is shown the street violence, the terror. So this isn't, this isn't just an intellectual exercise, Right. This is a hundred years of total, complete violence from the left.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Well, to prove the point, right, There's a, an argument out there that's not offered as though it's a strong man, a straw man, rather from the left, which is articulating explicitly in quotes that violence on the political left is more or less a myth. Some even use the word myth.
And yeah, I start this historical review at about 1860, 1886, rather. So it is more than a century. Yeah, about 125 years.
Political violence in this country has been a feature of life in America since its founding. That is not unique. The ideological categories that we know today that constitute left and right are a little muddled before we get closer to the 20th century. But as we get, as we approach the 20th century and with socialist movements on the rise in the late 1880s, early 1890s, we begin to see the contours of an intellectual dispute between left and right that, that look recognizable to us today.
And when you peruse the history books or you get an education in history in this country, nothing happened In America between 1886, the Haymarket Riots, in which, by the way, police officers were bombed, and the Palmer raids of 1919, 1920, except for the fact that America descended into a reactionary anti immigrant fervor. That is, that's the narrative that's promoted, and it allies along a history of violent labor disputes, labor unrest, and in support of that labor action, anarchistic and socialistic terror that crested in the 1910s and 1920s. That's just the first wave of violence we experienced from the left that is forgotten, quote, unquote, according to the historians who have only very recently begun to expose the true contours, the scale and scope of that terrorist campaign. And when you start to look at it, it looks a lot like the terrorist campaign of the Marxist guerrillas in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. And that looks a lot like the terrorist campaign of left wing political violence that this country has been experiencing, in my view, since 2010, accelerating dramatically in 2020 and into our period. So the question before us is, you know, we're constantly told that the American right is the most violent political faction in this country, the primary threat to social order and the social compact in the United States. And we hear about it after a successful or attempted assassination of a right wing figure. We hear it about after an assault on an ICE or CBP facility. We hear about it after the mobs that descend Almost nightly on American, major American urban centers like Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. So it's about time that you confront the evidence of your own eyes. And I hope Blood in Progress does that for its readers.
[00:06:57] Speaker D: Absolutely. And look, like you mentioned, we could go back to I guess the Vice President killing Alexander Hamilton. Right. Or we could we come all the way forward. But you are right, the 1880s post grant. I mean Garfield was shot by a kind of a nut. But as you enter the 20th century and I guess you, you walk us up to the sort of the Mitchell Palmer raids. I'm going to ask you about what those are in a second.
As an Irish Catholic from Philadelphia, you are right. There was an anti immigrant fervor that was definitely happening.
You know, some of the Tammany hall power came out of weaponizing the newly arrived Irish. Right. And you know, Boss Tweed was taken out by Caricaturist, which I write about, I've been writing about recently.
You know, the fact that death by cartoon, we love that here at Dangerous Laughter. Anytime a cartoonist can take out a huge political figure and reset the board, we love that there are worse idols
[00:07:54] Speaker A: to have than Thomas Knapping past.
[00:07:55] Speaker D: That's exactly correct. So, so yeah, because I wanted to ask you guys, let's, let's grab the, let's grab the graphic from the book itself here. I want the audience to see this.
Now this is by no means the mission statement. I mean you just heard way more than we're giving you here. But Noah basically says this is a book about assassin, the, the assassins, the vandals, the small cell terrorists and the lizard brain mobs.
I love that. That mete out destruction, violence and the death in the name of political causes and the pursuit of political outcomes. We often hear about how American political violence is attributed to the right. And look, let's be honest, we just discovered, and I wrote a whole parody political, you know, satire book about it, that the very fine people in Charlottesville were being paid.
The very fine people were being paid. They're coming out of the cornfields and they're getting money from the Southern Poverty Law center that this is attributed to the right occasionally within minutes of the latest episode of verifiable left wing violence. It is a claim often predicated on selectively curated statistics and it increasingly flies in the face of the evidence of your own eyes. I mean, and that's true. I mean it's not. And what you're basically saying, and we're doing, you know, a hundred years here you go further, is that what you see, you said 2010. I'm assuming we're talking Occupy Wall street coming all the way forward. We got Black Lives Matter. We got the George Floyd incident. We got, you know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. Barack Obama statements, all these things, these are all little, you know, just sort of the reemergence of something that is not new. I tell people this all the time. When people ask me, what's the definition of wokeism? It's not new.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: It.
[00:09:41] Speaker D: It is a. It is a mixture of something that's been with us for some time. You know, it's political correctness, the social justice warriors. But what happens when it's not just. When it's not just wokeism, when it's actually, as you write about, you know, the bombing of Wall street, the bot. The attempted bombing of St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City? People, guys, you got to get this book. People don't know about that now.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: They don't. One of my fears was that these stories were not as forgotten as their scholars made them out to be, that there was some common knowledge of these periods, and there really isn't. Even the people who live through them who I speak to, not necessarily 10s and 20s, because that's so distant from us now, but the 60s, 70s, and 80s and 20s, because that'S so distant from us now. But the 60s, 70s, AND 80s, you know, we have a fantastic.
Probably a human evolutionary trait and the ability to compartmentalize trauma and to move past it and to not think about it. I mean, that's just something that we've evolved, I think, in order to manufacture some sort of a way to get through life. Right, because otherwise you're dwelling on the. On the miseries of humanity at all, given any given moment. And that is one of the things that I wrote about my second book, the Rise of the New Puritans Fighting back against progressives, War on Fun. That wokeism had emerged as something like a covenant for social interaction, an entire contract of society and a societal organizing philosophy, not just a religious. A religious tendency, which is what scholars like John McWater attributed to it. And I said, yeah, in that one. And I said in that one, that basically this was the remoralization of life. It was sort of. It was a repudiation of a very brief libertinism that rose to the fore in progressive thought in the 60s and 1970s. But that turned out to be the aberration, right, because progressivism emerged from the experiment with Protestantism and utopianism. In New England, which is where, you know, the Puritan experiment, a very short live experiment that actually only has this long tail because everybody wrote so frequently within Puritanism, that's one of the few things they could do for fun. But what they also did was apply a moral framework to every single thing you possibly did. And that you had to be working in a meliorist fashion to elevating the human experience, bettering the human condition. And if you weren't doing that, you would at least dwell on it and just consume yourself with the problems of the planet Earth. That was how you evinced your membership in the elect, ascended to voting rights status within the puritan social milieu. And it just, you know, the sweat on your brow, the labors that you were devoting to this cause, that was how you proved your, your value to your society and your commitment to puritanism as a social cause.
[00:12:30] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: And that, that's looked a lot like wokeism to me. But there is another element of it, and that is the latent socialistic, anarchistic tendency to believe that violence is the proper remedy for social discrimination. Systemic oppression, as you define it, often subjectively.
And the notion being that a revolutionary social upheaval in which those who at the top, top of the pyramid are brought low and those at the bottom are, are raised up, that is a messianic vision for society. And it is one that too often greases the skids for violence.
[00:13:04] Speaker D: Absolutely. And look, and the audience that knows me, you know, when I do other shows, when I, when I hear, when I'm hosting dangerous laughter, I always tell everyone the second we start, and this is puritanism, the second we start applying purity tests to our politics. I mean, look, purity tests haven't, didn't go over well in the 20th century, but there are the left wing, they're applying purity tests, you know, writ large. That's why Fetterman doesn't pass it. That's why Lieberman couldn't pass it. It's why many people, you don't see people like Evan by anymore. You don't see people like, you know, Heath Schuler out there or even guys like Ed Rendell and Bloomberg. They could never, I mean, Bill Clinton could never, you know, be the, the governor of Arkansas today, but he could never do it because know the purity tests applied won't work. Now there are people that were for Trump and now they're against Trump. Trump's not passing their daily purity purity tests. You know, it's funny, you talk about the Puritans we're gonna take a break here in a second.
Yes, they were. They were in New England, but, you know, and I've been working on something behind the scenes that they didn't. They didn't just start in New England. They. They hunted playwrights like Ben Johnson. I mean, they wanted. They wanted plays shut down in Elizabethan England. That's how far back we're talking about. They were hunting fun. Then they would call this guy called the Master of Rebels. Oh, I'm gonna read your play before you go. You go on stage. Right? So. So it's the same thing applied there, applied here. And then when you're talking about. You inject this Marxism DNA into it and the utopianism into it, and the fact that they can justify all manner of sin and violence for their political means. I mean, that is why, guys, you got to go get blood. In progress, we're going to take a break here. I've got Noah Rothman. We will be right back.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: In today's breaking news, the Curse of the Bearded lady by AJ Rice has already hit number one on Amazon new Releases, and it is only on pre sale.
[00:15:02] Speaker E: You should be women.
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret that. You are so.
Someone once said comedy is the art of turning horror into humor. That's the essence of the Curse of the Bearded Lady. Laughing in the face of madness before it devours us whole. The curse of the Bearded Lady.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: And now, please enjoy another elegant celebrity endorsement of dangerous laughter with A.J.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: rice.
[00:15:49] Speaker F: Hey, how's it going? This is Jon Gruden, the old coach, just getting started here. It's an early morning in Las Vegas right now. The streets are quiet out there, but last night, they were rocking. They were all talking about A.J. rice. A.J. rice is live.
I love this guy, man. This is your moment right now. If you're gonna host your own podcast, you gotta be a nightmare for the opposing team. And I'm into nightmares.
I mean, I want you to live rent free inside the enemy's head. Byob Be your own blocker.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Hustle, hustle, hustle.
[00:16:29] Speaker F: Rice, Flip right, double X, jet 36, counter naked, Waglet 7X quarter.
I mean, I want you to be a player, not a spectator. Rice.
Let the competition come. Rice. Bring it on.
Be the franchise quarterback. Rice.
You got a motor, kid. Everybody sees it right now. Hit the gas, hit the and run these guys over. And don't forget Spider2y banana execution. Congratulations, you've been diagnosed with dangerous laughter. Now get out there and win.
Love you, man.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: This endorsement has Been brought to you by collapsing standards everywhere. And now back to Dangerous Laughter.
[00:17:15] Speaker G: The management of this station are clueless.
You're listening to Dangerous Laughter with AJ Rice on the Publius Media Network.
[00:17:28] Speaker D: We are back. Dangerous Laughter. I am AJ Rice. I've got Noah Rothman with me, senior editor at National Review. Got this great book. I mean, he's written really a trilogy on the modern left, which I love. All right. I mean, really, he has. I mean, I call my trilogy the, you know, the mental illness trilogy. But this is really a survey of the last hundred years blood and progress.
You guys got to go out and get a copy, help pay for that Jeff Bezos wedding. Go over to Amazon. A century of left wing violence in America. You know, you, you set the introduction up. And I don't know whether you were working on this book the day this happened or, you know, I don't know how it happened, but the Charlie Kirk assassination is sort of the framework of the introduction to the book. So September 10th of 2025.
And I mean, I am someone that, you know, I work with Charlie. I was a publicist on some of his books on the. Not the one that Eric is out promoting now, but the one prior, the one before that, the college scam.
You know, I was mentored by Andrew Breitbart.
I grew up listening to Rush and Howard.
Charlie's one of these guys that, you know, Howard, before he, you know, went to the diddy white parties and gave himself 50 boosters in the basement with Billy Joel there on Long Island. Anyway, but I'll tell you, there is
[00:18:58] Speaker A: deep FM radio lore.
[00:19:00] Speaker D: Yes, right. Well. And you've got a little bit in your DNA too, which I hopefully will get to today. But I, I will tell you guys, there are very few figures that are never elected to, to public office. You know, Reagan, Newt, Trump, others that re. Re sort of set the board and, and sort of change the game of let's call it conservatism. Because I know we got a bunch of people on the right. Some of them are my buddies.
You know, they might not like everything I'm saying lately, but, you know, some of them, I've been the publicist for, some of them I've been the executive producer for that. You know, are. Is this still conservatism that we're doing? Are we just all just sort of wandering around with our little tribes going down rabbit holes? Charlie was one of these guys that I think held some of the, the kookiness together, kept some of the tribes from totally going after each Other. Right. And. And so to answer that, did. Were you writing the book when. When the assassination happened?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
So the story of the book is bound up in the violent wave we've been experiencing over the course of the last decade or more, in my view.
So, yeah, I've been chronicling America's descent into political violence for the better part of a decade, and it had become more intolerable than I could ignore by 2015, 2016. And this book is not exclusively about the left. You cannot write this book honestly without describing the degree to which violent radicals on the right and the left take inspiration from each other to resolve to mete out vengeance against each other, believe that the state is on the side of their political adversaries and is therefore indistinguishable from their political adversaries. All this stuff is bound up in this psychology, and you can't write about it truthfully without writing about that. So in 2015, 2016, I was writing about the degree to which President Donald Trump encouraged or at least turned a blind eye towards expressions of violence for his political cause. I was very condemnatory of that. I didn't think that was great. But at the same time, people get knocked out.
[00:21:06] Speaker D: People get knocked out at rallies. Yeah, yeah, it was, like, wild. It was like UFC on the floor of his rallies.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Yeah, he was. If he wasn't outright supportive of that, he was dismissive of the notion that it was something that he needed to personally tamp down himself. And I thought he did.
But it had coincided with expressions of violence to which we become inured from the political left going back to 29, 1999, really, with the WTO riots, and then exploding to the scene in 2010 and 2011 and 2012 with the Occupy Wall street movement, nascent Occupy Wall street movement in 2010, but exploding into the scene in 2011.
And Democrats turned a blind eye to that. Indeed, they fetted that movement, thought it would lend them some political power and authority, and they fell for it again, by the way, in 2020, even though everybody in the street had no use for Democrats. If you surveyed the average Occupy Wall Streeter, they would say, throw them into the ocean with the Republicans. We don't need these people. They're part of the problem. Nevertheless, Democrats ignored it. And throughout 2016, Republicans and Trump supporters were being attacked in the streets, having the clothes ripped off, their backs, being pelted with objects, beaten, bloody, including police. And it was just not getting the same coverage that the president's agitation was getting, and that became intolerable. Over the course of this decade, especially after 2020. And so by 2024, in the wake of the assassination of CEO Brian Thompson, UnitedHeal CEO Brian Thompson which was itself a very illustrative event, John Pod Horiz over at Commentary magazine commissioned a piece for the magazine on political violence from the left. My publisher, or rather my agent, reached out, said, you should write a book treatment around this. But it was a tough sell, and it was a tough sell until June last year, when Sarah Milgram and Yaron Leshinsky were assassinated outside of a Jewish event in Washington, D.C. by a bookcase, Elias Rodriguez, who was as Marxian and revolutionary as you get, but was also in love with Islamist movements, which, by the way, again, have a long history, a long history of being tied up with the Marxian guerrilla movements of the nation.
[00:23:05] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: And especially after the Islamic revolution of Iran. But it wasn't until Charlie was murdered that they pushed up the book. So the book was supposed to be published in October of this year. And my publisher, after Charlie's murder, said that this was too important of a subject to wait that long. It has to come out as soon as possible. So we did push the manuscript along at an accelerated pace at that point. But it was the introduction, whatever it was beforehand was thrown out so that we can focus on this particularly traumatic event and what it says about political violence in the United States in this, in this moment.
[00:23:39] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, look, it's one of those things, you know, I'm a sort of geriatric millennial, so I'm, you know, older than Charlie. I mean, you and I. Yeah, you and I are close to the same age. And, you know, you just don't get people like this. And, you know, some of the nuttiness you see out there on the right right now in the commentary space, you know, the idea that, look, I say it all the time. Totalitarians of a feather will flock together. Hitler really didn't believe the Italians were white, and he certainly wasn't in the business of cutting deals with an Asian country, but they were willing to do it. And, you know, when you saw October 7th happen, we have a, you know, Chuck Schumer's chubby niece who's Jewish, Amy Schumer's out there. I, I can't believe that, you know, the socialists of America don't like Jews or don't like Israel. Sarah Silverman was stunned. They were stunned that, that, you know, that the Taliban minded people, the Hamas minded people were going to go after Jews immediately, even left wing ones, even Democrat ones. I mean, they're stunned. Yeah, we had to transfer Palestine and all the rest of it. It's just living hypocrisies.
But it's amazing when they find out that, you know, they're. The firing squad's coming for them too. Right.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Well, they should have known that within moments of October 7, because the initial outburst of hostility towards the Israeli response to October 7, that massacre didn't wait for the Israeli response to that massacre. It began within hours, the people in the streets demonstrating against this Israel and imposing very weird narratives on them that don't make a lot of sense outside the context of a very narrow and jingoistic conception of the United States and then layering it on to the Middle East. So throughout the book, you know, I note the degree to which a lot of the anti Israel narratives we hear are very similar to, if not unreconstructed, examples of propagandistic narratives that were retailed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, late 1960s, early 1970s, as part of a Soviet geopolitical project. The design being to delegitimize the Israeli state, which had gravitated towards the United States, and to lend more credence and authority to the Arab militaries that the Soviets had invested in and were defeated in 1967 and 1973, showing that these were really poor investments. So they were just trying to recoup some of the investment that they had lost in these Arab militaries. And a lot of those narratives are still with us. But after October 7th, you would hear people describe the degree to which Hamas's murderers, who engaged in incredible atrocities, inhumane acts of absolute savagery and brutality, that they were essentially like American slaves engaged in a slave revolt against their oppressors, which makes absolutely zero sense within the context of the Middle East. Only if you have a very narrow conception of American racial history and then lacquer that onto the Middle east as like a heuristic to try to figure it out. Does that make any sense?
[00:26:48] Speaker D: Yeah. And look, and we've got people on the right and the left. They're, they're, they're playing kiss and tell with Hamas. They love Wahhabism. They want to go on dates with the mullahs of Iran. I mean, they're making all excuses, every, any excuse possible to try to, I guess, extrapolate far enough from reality to, you know, well, you know, Islam this and that, and, you know, you know, Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet. I mean, the, the, the extent with which I don't want to go too deep on this, but, and maybe in the next segment, but the extent with which the right is playing footsie with some of this totalitarianism, Islamic totality, as if like from let's, let's just start with maybe the Iranian revolution or the Marine barracks bombing in 83 all the way forward.
It's not just, it's not a bunch of like Irish Catholic nuns from Minnesota that are doing this to Western civilization, which includes Israel. Israel is the canary in the mineshaft as far as I'm concerned, for Western civilization. Right, but they don't even like that. They don't even like that.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: NOAH yeah, and the Irish Catholic nuns in Minnesota are not the practitioners of this violence. They are, though, creating a permission structure around it by trying to figure out how to excuse it. There's elements of that in this book and especially around 2020 where you had good, well meaning liberals who are, you know, pillars of their community, stakeholders in the future have children trying to rationalize themselves into the notion that expressions of mass violence and property destruction in the name of revolutionary justice is desirable and we should just stand out of the way if not being outright supportive of it.
[00:28:24] Speaker D: Right?
[00:28:24] Speaker A: That's the kind of construct that you have to talk yourself into when you have a gun pointed at the back of your head. Whether you express that or not, these are expressions of fear and intimidation, which is the outgrowth of a terroristic campaign. You are effectively terrorized. And that's what I'm trying to get you to recognize, that you're being victimized here. And it's not the right that is victimizing you. And anybody who celebrates violence as a remedy to social dysfunction, whatever that happens to be, is not on your team. Even if they hate all the people you hate and you hate those people too, these people are not doing you any favors or your movement any favors. They need to be cast out.
[00:28:58] Speaker D: Right, let's talk just briefly here. I don't think we have time for this sound bites. I think it's, it's over a minute long. Might bump in with it in the next one. But this idea of assassination chic. Now you spend time on Two Luigi's in your book, but for the purpose of what I'm talking about, there is a the modern boy band, Menudo's Luigi that's in prison right now. This, he has become a heartthrob. And this isn't the first time this has happened. Right? How many dopey actresses have we seen with the Che with the Che T shirt and the chain, the Che purse and the, I mean, that's what they've turned him into, Right. A modern day Marxist heartthrob, a murderer.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Yeah, there's, there's definitely. Allegedly. Because he's on trial. There is definitely an element of that. Yeah. That he's an attractive man. And therefore a lot of people have subordinated everything they know about being a proper and decent human being to that latent affection. But I, I'm not attributed all of this hero worship around this cold blooded killer allegedly to the fact that he's attractive because he was not recognized, he was not known, identified or captured before that started.
He wasn't captured for a week and the celebration of his bloodletting happened immediately.
[00:30:15] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: And there are a lot of people who knew better. And you know, it was, he was captured after a week. So this, this definitely accelerated after his capture. And he was discovered to be kind of like the Sarnaya brother who was captured after the 2013 Boston.
[00:30:28] Speaker D: That's right.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Marathon bombing was, you know. Well, he's attractive. So maybe we can compartmentalize all that murder that he did.
[00:30:34] Speaker D: Yeah.
Inconvenient assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of Manhattan. Oh, he look, you know, he looks like a young Al Pacino. I mean, I mean, come on. I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous.
But the left does this. They romanticize this violence.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:50] Speaker D: Now some of it is due to our literature. Right. I mean, Hemingway goes and fights the, you know, Franco and you know. But there is some of that in this. But I mean, you and I know what I just referenced. These people don't. They're being driven by the phones to glorify and turn into, you know, teen magazine pop culture heartthrobs killers like Luigi.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: And it's driven from below. You know, the, the Democratic officials and, and members of Congress like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders and others who condemned the murder but appended a butt after it, which renders everything that you just said perfunctory and dismissible. But you have to understand the health insurance industry in this country is, is horrible. You have to understand everybody's angry. In Bernie Sanders case, you have to understand that everything's broken. The financial system is broken, the housing system is broken, the campaign system is broken. The election system is broken. The education system is broken. Everything is broken. Therefore, what we need in this country, the remedy to all our ills, is a comprehensive solution, a revolutionary solution. And there's this delusion that persists in the minds of those who are attracted to political violence, that one galvanizing act of bloodshed will shake the public out of their complacency. And they will at last join us on the lines of hostility against the state. And we will bring it crumbling around us. All they need to do is be shown that it can be done, and they will finally join us as they so often want to do. That is a delusion that persists throughout history, and we saw it immediately in the wake of the murder of Brian Thompson, with his name being cheered on SNL and at concerts and the words that he scratched under those bullet casings, sold on merchandise and his face being put on prayer candles. All that stuff was an expression of this revolutionary ethos, that violence, yeah, it's not great. But if it gets us one step closer to the revolution in which you and I will get what's coming to us, then it's necessary.
[00:32:48] Speaker D: And that's why they were okay with it. That's why there were inscriptions on Charlie Kirk's murderers bullets. That's why they're okay with burning Tesla dealerships. Whatever it takes to, you know, propel the revolution into the future, no matter how many casualties, they will do it. We're going to take a break here. I am AJ Rice. This is dangerous laughter. We will be right back with Noah Rothman.
[00:33:10] Speaker C: I'm spiritually aligned with revolution. I don't see color unless it's white.
Then I see genocide.
The Black Lives Matter support group rejected me again, even though I wrote an apology letter to Harriet Tubman.
They said my white privilege energy was too aggressive.
Can you believe that?
Every day I wake up and hate that I was born in America. I even moved to Venezuela for two weeks. But Uber Eats didn't work, so I moved back. And now I just sit and meditate on my colonizer shame.
I breathe through my white shame.
I meditate on how to destroy capitalism while I order everything on Amazon Prime.
I have no brain of my own now and believe everything the fake news media feeds me.
I am the Woking dead.
[00:34:04] Speaker G: Stay locked in with the man who slayed the Woking dead.
This is dangerous Laughter with AJ Rice on the Publius Media Network.
[00:34:15] Speaker E: You should be women.
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.
Someone once said comedy is the art of turning horror into humor. That's the essence of the curse of the bearded lady. Laughing in the face of madness before it devours us whole.
Nothing in living memory has been funnier or more horrifying than a movement convinced there are 72 genders. Boys have a penis. Girls have a voice. Vagina. The curse of the bearded lady. The curse of the bearded lady.
The trans mafia has whipped America's sanity.
It's Monty Python by way of Mangalo. Absurd theater with real victims.
I'm not here to conduct a medical examination of the Trans Mafia.
This is a cultural autopsy. If Billy Shakespeare could write tragedies, histories and comedies, why can't I? The radicals refuse to surrender their gender mad stranglehold on America's vital institutions.
This book will show how we got here, how we fight back, and how the Democratic Party's obsession with mainstreaming the bearded lady will doom it to political extinction.
[00:35:39] Speaker C: Foreign.
[00:35:44] Speaker G: Rush Limbaugh was born on January 12, 1951. Howard Stern was born on January 12, 1954. A.J. rice was born on January 12, 1980. You don't always get the hero you want.
Sometimes you get the hero you deserve.
You're listening to Dangerous Laughter on the Publius Media Network.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Brian Thompson. That's all I'm gonna say.
That's all I want to say. Brian Thompson. His mom. That lady said something on Inside Edition.
I said. I said what? I said. I don't give a. His children are better off without him. They need to learn to not be like their dad and enjoy the blood money. Kids, I'm standing on business. Brian Thompson. I don't give a guy. Millions of Americans.
Brian Thompson was a terrorist.
And more people should acknowledge this and be appropriate. He will sit he dancing on the graves into people who profit off killing me.
That's completely called for and predicated and normal. This has gone on for too long. This should have happened decades, decades ago, okay? This is long overdue. I have been waiting for someone like this mysterious hero to appear my prayers. So if you guys are okay with someone like Ryan Thompson being around and not being a part of our society, that says more about you as a person because you look absolutely monstrous defending someone like that.
[00:37:34] Speaker D: No, that's wife material right there. Those three. Don't you think?
Don't you think? We're back with Noah Rothman, Blood and Progress. And, you know, as genteel. Well, one of them looks like she works at Hot Topic. The other one looks like she's, you know, know, role playing. Going to go buy her next manga.
Buy a little manga at Barnes and Noble, guys. If you go to Barnes and Noble, don't buy manga. Buy this, okay? Buy this. Buy blood in progress. Don't go to the manga section. And weird. Get weirded out or weird your Gen Z kids out. And then, you know, the other one kind of just looks like she could be, you know, a substitute kindergarten teacher and she's yelling f. F Brian Thompson F his family. I mean, how. Nor let me ask this question because this is what this is about.
They want this behavior normalized. How many people do you think out there, Noah, across the fruited plane agree with these three women?
[00:38:27] Speaker A: I think it's very, very few. But, but that doesn't mean that it's not a lot. In relative terms. You can say, you know, for example, that if you were to survey the public and found that only about 5% of people, people support some sort of extrajudicial violence in order to advance their political project, well, that's not a lot, Right, right. But it's millions of people. If you're talking about 5% of the American population and it's not contained or controlled. If that other 95% of the population which is ambivalent towards or hostile to expressions of violence to support some political outcome, if they're not policing that behavior among their ideological compatriots because they're too cowed, too intimidated themselves, well then the phenomenon progresses, metastasized further than it already has.
I wish I could say that that sort of sentiment was not encouraged among elites, but it reflects almost exactly the expressions of sympathy and affection for Luigi Mangione that Taylor Lorenz articulated in an award winning documentary that was broadcast on cnn.
[00:39:33] Speaker D: Wow.
[00:39:33] Speaker A: There's no difference. In fact, Lorenz said he looks like a fine, moral, upstanding person and described him in heroic terms for having engaged in this act of human sacrifice. First of all, those women are impossibly stupid. They are dirt stupid. Because what they're articulating is not, is not a supportable notion. What they're saying is that we should support, excuse a terrorist. She was saying of Brian Thompson, a father of two who was murdered on his fifth when he was only 50.
They're saying that the healthcare insurance industry rather in this country is guilty of its own sort of violence. A metaphorical violence, not really literal violence.
[00:40:12] Speaker D: That's right.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: But that metaphorical violence absolutely does license a literal murderous, violent response. Indeed, the rest of us should be bound up in it because as Lena Weisbrot said, that was the young lady in the hot topic here. As she subsequently said, we are the most cowed and passive population in the history of the planet Earth. Any other country would have risen up in violent revolution and overthrown its tormentors had they experienced the kind of conditions that we experience. She's just worked herself up into this notion. And thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of her compatriots are similarly beholden to a delusion. But it's a delusion that licenses violent remedies for otherwise banal political conditions or conditions that aren't even remediable by the American political system, which is itself constrained and not, not capable of intervening in a lot of private domains in ways that progressives want them to because they see things in totalistic terms. They're totalitarians themselves and want a totalistic and totalitarian solution to their political problems. And if the American republic is not, is not equal to that task, then you have to resolve to attack the foundations of this wholly immoral system that is just death to what you regard to be absolute moral imperatives. It's all delusional. It's all disordered thinking. But it's the sort of thing that is getting a friendly audience now from a lot of quarters in American society that know better or at least should know better.
[00:41:41] Speaker D: Sure, sure. And look, the digital space we now live in and the phones allow for this stuff to travel.
You can wear a GoPro camera and live stream your, Your violence. And I, you know, I, I think back to the old Bernie Goldberg book about how the newsrooms of America didn't look like America. And I think, I mean, it makes me feel, it makes me feel good for. To hear you say that you don't think there's that many of the wife, material girls out there.
But you know, I think back to, in relative terms, you know, Harvey Levin was reporting on tmz, the death of Charlie. And if you listen carefully when he was announcing it live, the creeps behind him down, you couldn't see them. A cheer went up from the newsroom of tmz, a cheer went up.
And I think about the, the interconnective tissue of academia, the media, you know, this street violence, thugs, who pays for them?
You know, we don't have time to unpack where the, you know, the, the U Haul trucks filled with cinder blocks are coming from. You guys can go find that on your own. But the point of Blood in Progress is we think history. If you think history began yesterday, that this is new, that the left hasn't been doing this for some time, you got another thing coming. And look, I don't want to, I don't want to bore the audience with this list and I hit people with it all the time, but starting with the Civil war, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, was shot.
Okay, then you could jump to the one Catholic and you've got basically Reagan and Trump shot. There were people that. There was an, I think an attempt maybe in Chicago on fdr, like metal mob related. There was people that wanted to kill Nixon and Ford. But most of my list are Republicans that have been. Most of those people were killed too. Reagan and Trump weren't, but they were all killed. And you know, so this idea that Republicans are, you know, the ones doing this or that conservatives are the ones doing this, I mean, other than jfk, every name that was has been killed since the Civil War has been a Republican.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: Well, what's in progress? Well, yeah, well, what blood in progress does is compile a pretty gratuitous and, and at times overwhelming list of events attributable to left of center disordered thinkers. If you engage in political violence because you think it's gonna beget some positive outcome, you're delusional to a certain degree. But nevertheless, explore what these people were thinking, what their designs were, what they wrote, what they said, what the audience for their violence. Cause there always is an audience. What they said and how they reacted to it. You know, I opened the book with Charlie Kirk's murder and again I bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear about the reaction to that, which was an attempt by left of center establishmentarians in the media and the political class to say, well, this didn't happen as you think it happened. Or maybe it was a right winger who did it, or maybe the person who did it had no political motives at all. They were just nihilists who wanted to see violence for violence sake. All of that is sort of an admission, and it's a useful one. It's one I can work with. Because inherent in that is in. In your attempts to misdirect people is an expression of a condemnation of political violence. What you're saying there is that this is taboo. We don't want to be associated with this phenomena because the American people don't like domestic political violence and will punish those who they believe are responsible for domestic political violence. That's a good stigma. I can work with that. But too often it is subordinated by the people who know better, who should be more responsible communicators and stewards of the American social contract. They put that all aside because they see in the expressions of political zeal like this a useful instrument, something that they can harness and redirect and maybe, maybe enliven a few people to join their side and support their political cause. And that is just really short sighted thinking that's going to backfire on America in pretty short order if we don't get our hands around this. My foremost goal with Blood in Progress is to convince you that the people who are violent, who may share some of your political predilections are not your supporters. They are not on your side. They're on their own side. And it's one that you should be aligned against.
[00:45:57] Speaker D: That's right.
We don't have a lot of time left, but I want to just touch on a little bit about your background and just a sort of broader media landscape out there.
So you and I, I mean, it looks like you were. You worked with John Bachelor on radio. Did you. You work with Opie and Anthony as well, Is that accurate?
[00:46:16] Speaker A: I did when I was. It sounds like our paths met across in radio. When I was a sophomore in college.
Yeah, I went to work at wabc. I started in sales, but I hated sales and wanted to move over to programming as soon as possible. So yeah, I sat in on what used to be the Bachelor and Alexander show in 2002 and then it became in the just John's show, John Bachelor. And I was there from 2002 to 2006, but I bounced all over the radio world. Yeah, I was at Free FM briefly, but when it was switched over from KROC to a talk program, talk programming sort of situation for about a year and a half before that programming flipped. And yes, I did an internship with Opie and Anthony when they started on XM radio in 2004 and 2005. So yeah, I bounced all over the talk radio world for a while.
[00:46:58] Speaker D: I know, I know Kumia. And look, during this time period I was, I was working on the Hill. I was hired by Ingram to basically be her assistant on radio.
And then I became her associate producer and I became her executive producer. I was also an executive producer for Monica Crowley. I've worked.
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Oh wow.
[00:47:15] Speaker D: Really cool man cow, Michael Savage, Dr. Laura, Tammy Bruce. I was brought in by John Solomon to launch a show at the Washington Times.
And then I helped Glenn Beck set up the Blaze Radio network, which when it, when it launched was just audio and it was Buck Sexton, Chris Salcedo, Jay Severin, they were the, the original lineup. So I mean that. But that's 12 years ago now. I've been in this, doing this for some time. I think about our media and I look, you're at National Review and I know National Review wasn't thrilled with the emergence of Trump, you probably like more about what's going on with him now most days than. Than what happened. But I, I just want to. I want to bring some, Some attention to something.
Earlier we talked about Rush and Breitbart and Charlie. I have made the case. So you and I, basically, we didn't just show up here, as you just heard about Noah's background. We matriculated and were planted in the woods or in the. In the field, and we went through a process. We didn't just tell someone off on YouTube and get plucked. And just as much as I'd like to do that, it just get plucked from the field like Charlie did to Candace, and all of a sudden you're a superstar.
So there. And look, I have no problem with overnight success. I have no problem with, with people that mean Bob Hope, you know, worked in the mail room. I have no problem. Right. So he went through it. He went through it. You and I have gone through a process.
I have three books. You have three books. And, and, you know, we have different types of colleagues. You know, I'm probably more aligned with the, you know, the Maga carnival. You know, I've worked with almost all of them, so I know them, you know, but I know. Also knew Rich Lowry and Jonah, and we used to book them as guests on Laura's show. And then all that kind of went away. Which brings me to today, your first book. You got a blurb from Megyn Kelly, who I used to know as Megan Kendall before she became Cali in a different life.
[00:49:14] Speaker A: Puritans is not puritans. Right? That's my second.
Yeah.
[00:49:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:49:19] Speaker D: So are you as shocked as I am that all of a sudden. And look, every, I guess revolution has a counter revolution, but ropes. Ropes. Rose. Pierre got his own. He tried to shoot himself. It didn't work. And then they chopped his head off. Right? He.
[00:49:32] Speaker F: He.
[00:49:32] Speaker D: Right. So whether it's the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks or whoever it is, we've got a group of people out there, you know, God bless them. I guess some of them, you know, are being consistent. I mean, Jones and Fuentes are basically saying the same they've always said, but some other people have changed.
They've changed. And I tell people, because we're in this sort of weird space where Trump can't run again. Rush, Andrew and Charlie are gone. There's no quality control. Now people might say, oh, what's that? Oh, is that censorship?
There is a sophistication that some of these people, I think, have, that they don't appear Candace is one thing because she was an Obama girl, but you know, Tucker and Megan and some others, you know, that, that they.
From my perspective, I think when I hear them talking about the wonders of Wahhabism or whatever the hell it is that, you know, the molocracy, I'm shocked at it. That, you know, the molecracy, I'm shocked at it. And we don't have a lot of time here, but I'll just, I'll just let you wrap it up there now.
[00:50:39] Speaker A: So I've been writing consistently about my apprehension and skepticism towards populist movements since as long as I can remember. My first book was called Unjust Social justice and the Unmaking of America. And my objection to the rise of social justice on the left and some of the mirroring of its tenants on the right, which was very nascent at the time that I wrote that book, 2017, 2018, published in January of 2019, was that it would lead to violence because it reduces individuals with individual agency to flattens them out, creates a caricature of them, renders those individuals avatars of a nondescript movement. And then once you've dehumanized them, well, you can, you have license to do whatever you want to them.
Populist movements, movements that are attracted to people power, by which I mean crowds, which can too often become mobs.
The Democrats are very, as I said in the earlier segment, very susceptible to this because they see Occupy Wall street, they see the George Floyd mobs, and they say, look at all those people.
I can harness that. I can direct their anger and call in a way that advances my political position, my cause, when they should be seeing that as a potential disaster, a looming disaster, because the crowd cannot be directed, harnessed and contained. It is its own organic phenomenon. As Elias Kennedy wrote in Crowds in Power. It is something that you can understand, you can study it, it has some predictive and predictable tendencies, but it is not your friend, it is not your ally, and it is something that is more apt to turn on you than it is to advance your cause or certainly reflect poorly on you and your movement. So I've been consistent about this from from day one, that populist movements and people powered movements are themselves a little dangerous. In a country that is hostile to majoritarianism like ours, we have a Republican form of government that tempers the passions of the majority. I don't want to put my rights up to a boat of the majority where 50% plus one gets whatever it wants. That's not how we do things. In this country. But that is how populism and populist movements tend to function. And they are easily susceptible to being hijacked by demagogues, and they're just as easily and susceptible to being hijacked by the latently violent, potentially violent. That is the highest expression of political zeal, after all. And if that's all you want in your political followers, you're going to get it right.
[00:52:58] Speaker D: And look, you know, Trotsky went to Mexico and Stalin had him tracked down. He didn't, he didn't pass the purity test, Right? And, you know, it was inevitable because of the, the, the, the rise of Trump, that once MAGA became the establishment, that there were going to be people that want just the perpetual revolution to continue, constant revolution. You know, like the, the Jeffersonians were enchanted by what was going on in France, whereas guys like Adams and Hamilton were like, whoa, wait a minute, this isn't what ha. You know, the, the storming of the Bastille is very different than what happened here.
But look, we. We're out of time here. We got to get you wrapped up. And look, Blood in Progress. He's got some blurbs from Ion, Hersy Ali, my buddy Ben, who used to be my lawyer when I was in radio once upon a time. You know, we got our start together. Got plenty of fun Ben stories, but Blood in Progress, Noah Rothman, senior editor at National Review. Check out his columns.
You know, he's, he's leading the fight in North Jersey. I think he's gonna head over to that, that ice detention center later and rough some people up. But gotta go get this book on Amazon, Blood in Progress, A Century of Left Wing Violence.
Noah, thanks for coming on, brother.
[00:54:13] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me, A.J. appreciate it.
[00:54:14] Speaker D: Absolutely. I'm A.J. rice. Remember, our job here is to transform horror into humor. We are unfit for polite company. Go get this book, guys. Go. You gotta. Gotta do it. Get two, hand them out to your blue hair Done. Nieces and nephews, we will catch you on the flip side.
[00:54:37] Speaker C: The emergency destruct system is now activated.
The option to override detonation procedure has now expired.
The ship will automatically destruct in E minus one minute.
[00:54:56] Speaker D: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
