A Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on political violence held on Oct. 28, 2025 reinforced what Americans who have eyes to see and ears to hear know: Democrats remain steadfastly committed to deception in order to satiate their grimy quest for power even if that deception jeopardizes the very lives of Americans.
Rhetoric about “fascism” and “Nazism,” though not nice, is not the problem. Straining to make the case that name-calling causes violence is a manifestation of leftist tactics. The claim that calling someone an ugly name is the ultimate cause of political violence constitutes the ideological framing for hate speech laws, which are themselves anti-freedom. Despite what lefties say, speech is not violence.
Inflammatory rhetoric emanates from both sides of the political divide, but only one side is animated by an ends-justifies-the-means ideology that urges political violence. The hearing proved that Democrats remain unwilling to acknowledge that the scourge of political violence we now face is caused by leftist ideologies.
If more violence is committed by those on the political left than on the right, it would be wise to figure out why and how to solve it. If intrinsic to a partisan ideology are justifications for political violence, then critically examining, condemning, and rejecting the ideology are necessary for the reduction of political violence.
Humility and courage are required for such an examination, condemnation, and rejection. Unfortunately, humility and courage are in woefully short supply in politics, a civic sport where pride and conformity are rewarded.
Democrat Senator Peter Welch set the non-productive tone:
[T]he stakes are really too high for the American people and the health of our democracy to use this hearing as an opportunity to demonize one side or the other. If all violence, all political violence is wrong, is evil, is corrosive, the debate about where there’s more on one side or the other, I don’t see how that helps us get anywhere. Politicizing violence with inflammatory rhetoric has real consequences, so all of us have to turn that temperature down.
Violence to effect political ends is, indeed, wrong, evil, and corrosive, and a case can be made for “turning the temperature down” through less nasty rhetoric. But the notion implicit in the words of Welch and other partisans that inflammatory rhetoric, purportedly employed equally by both sides, is the cause of political violence is an absurd claim intended to absolve leftists of culpability.
Refusing to debate the demerits of a particular ideology—or as Welch inaccurately described it “demonizing one side or the other”—is a juvenile escapist rationalization. Sometimes ideologies, policies, laws, and court decisions deserve demonization. Sometimes they embody such evil that hot rhetoric is merited.
A bit later, elderly, languorous Senator Dick Durbin donned his unity mask and rolled out some bipartisan-y sounding rhetoric:
I do not believe that one party owns the right to say it’s the other party’s fault. It is the fault of both parties in differing degrees, and it’s our fault if we try to whitewash that reality.
Note how he slipped in the “differing degrees,” implying one party is more guilty than another (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
That was it for Durbin’s nonpartisanship. From there he launched into a screed that was—according to him—completely objective. Not a speck of partisanship to be found, so said Tricky Dick:
These are not partisan talking points. They are the facts.
Those not-partisan facts came from “nonpartisan experts,” including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, proving beyond any doubt that “far right extremists have been responsible for most domestic terrorism, including most deaths by far. “
The nonpartisan-y Durbin then informed the committee that he is “deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s response to the political violence crisis.”
Durbin made clear that while “neither party owns the right to say it’s the other party’s fault,” he himself has the right to say it’s the other party’s fault, because, ya know, FACTS.
Fortunately, Michael Knowles too came armed with some facts—probably inconvenient facts for Durbin—that expose how leftists “cook the books” with regard to statistics on violence committed by leftists:
I looked into just a few recent examples that came to mind of prominent left-on-right violence. The Covenant School massacre in Nashville, in which a trans-identifying shooter murdered Christian schoolchildren after outlining her ideological motivations. According to authorities, there was no ideological motive there. Go figure. The Black Lives Matter riots, overtly leftist demonstrations that left dozens of people dead and over a billion dollars’ worth of property damage. Likewise, those fail to show up on registers of left-wing political violence. Even an attack by Antifa that targeted me personally, as well as conservative college students, for our political views appeared in official records and datasets as nothing more than obstructing law enforcement. It turns out the left commits relatively little political violence when you don’t count the political violence that the left commits.
Senator Cory Booker, who has achieved the remarkable feat of being the top fish in a sea of inauthenticity, deigned to make an appearance just long enough to make yet another inauthentic speech.
Booker haughtily condemned the “growing tribalism” and “partisanship” that prevents Congress from finding a “solution.” He found it “stunning that the way we talk about it seems more about grievance politics and trying to score points than actually getting to the root of what is an American problem,” which the omniscient Booker finds “so transparent and clear.”
Leaning forward on seat edges, hearing attendees waited with bated breath to hear the transparent and clear root of the American problem of political violence. Alas, all they heard was Booker faux-humbly boast about how he has done what no other Democrat has done: he, Booker, has admitted that “Chuck Schumer was very wrong” when he threatened a Supreme Court Justice.
At least as amazing to Booker is that Schumer actually apologized for his threatening faux pas, thereby proving how much better the Democrat tribe is.
Booker continued in his tribal way, criticizing President Trump for not confessing his own rhetorical sins and apologizing as the thoroughly non-partisan, non-tribal Schumer has.
Booker ricocheted wildly. First, he made syrupy appeals to cease “pitting witnesses against witnesses” and instead “just tell the truth” that “[t]here is political violence” on both the left and right.
Then with jarring abruptness, he expressed his deep partisan empathy for Democrat witness Daniel Hodges, a Jan. 6 police officer who described the hearing as,
a ham-fisted attempt to propagate the unsupported notion that liberal ideology is the greatest origin of modern political violence. This is particularly galling to me since every single member of the majority on the subcommittee has either contributed to one of the most infamous examples of conservative political violence of our age or the protection of its perpetrators. Every majority member who could do so voted to acquit Donald Trump during a second impeachment and now we find ourselves in a new horrific age of political violence.
Sounds a tad tribalistic and partisan. Booker may want to have a stern talking-to with Hodges about that.
One thing Booker didn’t provide was the transparent and clear solution to our American problem of political violence, so, I’ll take a stab at it.
It’s leftism that hates laws, rules, social conventions, history, borders, and the Constitution.
It’s leftism that endorses defunding and reimagining policing, disrupting ICE, and “decarcerating” criminals.
It’s leftism that foments societal hostility by dividing people and assigning them either status-oppressor or status-oppressed.
It’s leftism that decriminalizes theft, defaces and destroys monuments, loots and sets ablaze private property, attacks law enforcement, and cancels speakers.
It’s leftism that justifies and celebrates political assassinations.
The crisis of political violence doesn’t find its fountainhead in rhetoric. The crisis of political violence finds its fountainhead in ideology, namely leftism.
And it’s Democrats’ unprincipled, slavering for power that renders them vulnerable to the ideological predations of the growing number of anarchists who live and move and have their being in the Democrat Party.