Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, two Israeli diplomatic employees in Washington, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot. Apparently, the killer, Elias Rodriguez, emptied his handgun and fired off 21 rounds, killed them almost instantly, and then ran into the museum where they were working and started to act as if he was a victim until he shouted out “Free Palestine.”
And what are we to make of this? I think what we’re seeing throughout the United States right now is a lowering of the bar of what’s acceptable in terms of violence.
We saw that Luigi Mangione became a cult hero to the Left because he, in a premeditated fashion, killed a UnitedHealthcare executive, shot him down in cold blood on the specious excuse that they were overcharging people. But he became a hero.
And we saw that Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who beat his spouse, threatened to kill her, apparently, she thought he was gonna kill her; and was an illegal alien and had, at one time, deportation orders; and was a member, pretty clearly, of an MS-13 gang; and was engaged in human trafficking; and was deported—became a cult hero to the Left.
We had an incident in Texas where a young teenager stabbed another one and then he became a victim. No need to go into the details.
We had the two assassination attempts. And I think, if you collated the social media content of those two killers, it was pretty much, to the Left, kind of reminiscent of the shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise and the wounding of others who was a Sen. Bernie Sanders—what am I getting at?
There has been a general lowering of the bar, as I said, of what’s acceptable violence. And we saw that with the Tesla excuses and contextualization when somebody ran somebody off the road or destroyed a charging station or firebombed a station—even the media reports of the tragic deaths.
I was reading today an NPR account. And after about six paragraphs, they get uneasy describing the murder. And they just have to, they just have to put something in. And they do. And they say, “And this was during a period of tensions,” because of the people getting killed in Gaza. In other words—just a little bit—how can we get in there to justify this in some ways or contextualize it?
So, that is one thing that’s happening. And that makes violence more permissible. The other is this endemic antisemitism.
Let’s be honest. It’s not some cowboy in Wyoming in 1950 that doesn’t like Jews. We’re talking about two nexuses that come together and promulgate antisemitism. The one is wealthy people in the universities—many of them DEI, but not all—who feel that it’s either en vogue or, as DEI people, they cannot be criticized as victims for victimizing others, meaning foreign students from the Middle East.
And in that cauldron, it becomes permissible to say, “Globalize the intifada,” “River to the sea,” the eliminationist rhetoric about Israel, storm a library, chase Jews into a library, damage the president’s office, rough up a Jewish kid on campus. It was all acceptable. There were no consequences. That’s why those three college presidents either were fired or had to resign.
So, what we’re seeing is that the unhinged come out of the woodwork because the general climate rewards that type of behavior.
So, Rodriguez thought, A) If I use violence, in this case, bring a gun into Washington, D.C., from my home in Chicago, and I have good, firm left-wing credentials—his father was asked to be a guest at the Trump speech by a left-wing congressman, [Jesus] Garcia from Illinois. So, he comes in and he knows that if he shoots and murders someone, there’s going to be a lot of people who will praise him or at least excuse what he did, No. 1.
And No. 2, he’s killing Jews. So, he knows on campus that one of the Harvard Review people roughed up a Jew and was given a $65,000 honorarium scholarship from one of the groups that sponsors Harvard Law School.
Bottom line: This is gonna continue until somebody says, “We’re not gonna put up with it anymore. You’re not gonna be a foreign student and come over to the United States on a student visa and spout hateful rhetoric and torment Jews and make it uncomfortable. And you’re not gonna be one of these elite students who crashes into the president’s office at Stanford or crashes into a building at Columbia and thinks there’s no consequences.”
And that’s why President Donald Trump is trying to shock treatment to the universities to say: You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re a global embarrassment, that you permitted and you have fueled antisemitism. And the Left’s atmosphere, anyway, is to condone violence when it’s used for revolutionary purposes.
Add it all up and we get two wonderful people murdered in D.C.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.