Days of Rage
The political Left was born in the bloody mayhem of the French Revolution, and its favorite political “action” has always been murder
My heart goes out to millions of sane, decent people in their teens, 20s and 30s across America. People who go to work, help their parents, try to do the right thing.
They are waking up, and, perhaps for the first time, finally realizing just how murderous their heroes on the political Left really are.
The cold-blooded assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in broad daylight, his throat blown apart in front of his three-year-old daughter, blood gushing from his neck like a fountain, has torn the scales from many people’s eyes.
And many are genuinely shocked at what they are seeing.
The decent ones are finally understanding what their world-weary elders have known for decades: that behind the rhetoric of the “progressive” Left, behind the talk of equality and compassion and a more just society, lies the desire for mass slaughter.
The political Left was born in the bloody mayhem of the French Revolution, and its favorite political “action” has always been murder.
“We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man,” the French revolutionary leader Robespierre famously proclaimed, before his allies executed him as well. “We must exterminate all our enemies.”
“The only language that the servants of imperialism have demonstrated to understand is the language of arms,” the Red Brigades wrote, before they shot Italian prime minister Aldo Moro 11 times in the chest in 1978.
Nothing has changed.
In 2017, a 66-year-old left-wing activist named James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Virginia.
Republican congressman Steve Scalise, a congressional aide (Zack Barth), a Tyson Foods lobbyist (Matt Mika), and two Capitol Police officers were wounded.
In June 2022, an armed man named Nicholas Roske traveled from California to the Maryland home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, intending to assassinate him. Roske brought a Glock pistol, two magazines, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, a hammer, a crowbar, and duct tape.
On December 4, 2024, a 26-year-old spoiled rich kid and Antifa activist named Luigi Mangione — now celebrated by gushing college kids as a latter-day Jesse James — waited for an insurance executive near a hotel entrance in Manhattan and shot him three times (in the back and calf) with a suppressed, partially 3D-printed Glock 19 pistol, killing him in cold blood.
And of course, Donald Trump was the victim of not one but two assassination attempts by far-left lunatics.
The first attempted assassination of Donald Trump took place July 13, 2024 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots from a rooftop, wounding Trump and striking three other people (one fatally) before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The second attempted assassination of Donald Trump occurred on September 15, 2024, at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The suspect, 59-year-old ActBlue and Bernie Sanders supporter Ryan Wesley Routh, was found with a rifle in a "sniper's nest" near the sixth hole as Trump golfed with a friend.
This is, and always has been, what the political Left fantasizes about: killing its enemies.
The Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization that tracks online extremist hate, reports that 55% of self-identified leftists believe that murdering President Donald Trump is at least somewhat justifiable.
According to the report, 48% of leftists felt the same about Elon Musk.
Now we are seeing thousands of people — in the U.S. but also in the European Parliament — actually laughing about Charlie Kirk’s brutal slaughter.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were two kinds of counterculture revolutionaries.
First, there were the hippies, spoiled suburban kids like myself who listened to folk rock music and dreamed of a life closer to nature. This was just a fad, of course, and for most it didn’t last long.
But there was another, smaller, more sinister group in the 1970s for whom the counterculture was not a mere fashion statement.
They were hard-core Marxist true believers.
Brainwashed by such left-wing radicals as Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis and George Jackson, they genuinely despised America and her founding ideals of freedom and equality under the law.
These people didn’t live in tipis in the woods.
They planted bombs in the U.S. capitol, Pentagon and State Department, ambushed police, murdered black officials they deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause, sought “asylum” in places like North Vietnam and Cuba, and talked openly of igniting race wars as a means of destroying capitalist society.
Virtually all “anti-fascist” communists of one form or another, given to street brawls with the police, these self-styled urban commandos had names like the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Muslims, and the Black Liberation Army.
They openly promoted violence and hatred of “Amerika.”
They said Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colorblind society was merely another form of white supremacy.
They insisted, like Mao, that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
As the Weather Underground’s 1974 Prairie Fire manifesto put it, “The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.”
Black activists were even more blunt.
“Kill a few and get a little satisfaction,” said Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, speaking of white politicians. “Kill some more and you get some more satisfaction. Kill ’em all and you get complete satisfaction!”
In short: if you think society is unraveling today, try living in the 1970s – the era of plane hijackings, race riots and seemingly daily bombings of federal institutions.
According to Time Magazine, “in a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.”
As documented in the depressing book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, eventually the total number of bombings reached 6,000.
I remember very clearly when Patty Hearst, the heiress, was kidnapped in 1974. I was seventeen and in my junior year at a Catholic high school.
She was only two years older than I was, and yet, after she was brainwashed by her captors, there Patty was on the evening news, brandishing her sawed-off M-1 rifle during a bank robbery.
In a chilling 1975 film called “Katharine,” Sissy Spacek portrayed this type of brainwashed white girl — much like the screaming harpies on today’s campuses — who joins a violent underground terror cell, loosely based on the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton.
Well, you know the rest of the story.
Sane America recoiled from these would-be communist revolutionaries – opposed, as they were, to everything America represented.
Even the Beatles mocked them (“You say you want a Revolution?”)
The country elected law and order candidates like Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, vigilante movies like “Dirty Harry” (1971) and “Death Wish” (1974) became popular, and people even began to reconsider the whole drug and free love culture that, some suspected, may have led to this insanity.
The Marxist killers and would-be dictators were driven back under the rocks from which they came. They were driven out of polite society.
New York Jewish intellectuals like Leonard Bernstein — who famously hosted a gathering of Black Panthers for his white liberal friends to virtue-signal about — stopped inviting them once the bullets started flying.
Yet the hard-core true believers didn’t go away: after serving time in some cases for their crimes, they began the “long march through the institutions” advocated by the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci.
Having failed to overthrow society directly, the urban commandos infiltrated America’s schools, newspapers, TV networks, and board rooms.
The members of the Weather Underground, like founders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, became “educators” and lawyers, venture capitalists and TV executives.
Quite a few became Democrat politicians and hob-nobbed with future president Barack Obama, who himself became a “community organizer” like his hero, the radical activist Saul Alinsky.
The hard-left revolutionaries who built bombs in the 1970s went on to join college faculties and the media, brainwashing a whole new generation of impressionable kids with their hatred of peaceful “suburban” society.
Many are now in the 70s and ‘80s, demented former radicals who showed up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations and yelled insults at the police, just like when they were seventeen.
Their messages are the same today as they were in the 1970s: America is “systemically” racist, police are the enemy, democracy is a con, and violence is necessary to effect political change.
Their children and now grandchildren have taken up the cause of screaming insults at police and undermining America’s democratic institutions from within.
You can see them daily on the evening news, chanting antisemitic slogans and supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas.
Chesa Boudin, the son of Weathermen terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert – convicted of killing two police officers and a security guard during a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car – was elected in 2019 as the San Francisco District Attorney.
Like his parents, Boudin believes that arresting criminals for committing crimes is “racist.”
He advocates eliminating cash bail, emptying the prisons, and prosecuting members of the country’s border police.
After four years of watching Boudin release the most violent criminals onto the streets of San Francisco and refusing to prosecute routine crime, even the city’s most demented liberals eventually had enough. In a special election in 2022, Boudin lost by a landslide in a recall election.
Just as the riots and domestic terrorism of the 1970s filled America with revulsion, so, too, the “mostly peaceful protesters” of today – the pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses, and the bloodthirsty assassins who gun down people like Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson -- are also triggering a massive backlash among ordinary Americans of all creeds and colors.
Americans want these violent nutcases brought to justice.
They want an end to the far-left political extremism now endemic within the Democratic Party — a party that routinely calls a liberal Republican like Donald Trump the reincarnation of Hitler and his tens of millions of supporters fascists and Nazis.
It’s precisely this kind of lunatic rhetoric on the part of Democrats that made the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk possible.
Robert J. Hutchinson is an award-winning travel writer and the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at RobertHutchinson@substack.com