Here’s the key fact about leftist movements: They are intent on transforming society and won’t take “no” for an answer. Therefore, they turn to coercion and, should there be any resistance to that coercion, they turn to outright violence.

In this powerful American Mind essay, Professor Gabriel Brahm examines the connection between leftists and violence.

Brahm writes,

In roughly psychoanalytic terms, they gravitate toward alibis for sadism, humiliation, and even outright murder of the hated, fantasized object or ‘other’ standing in the way of their ‘progress.’ They seek a ‘permission structure’ to vent their spleen. According to René Girard, these befuddled victimizers of innocents—ironically enough, most convinced of their own moral purity in the very commission of their crime—hunger for sacrificial scapegoats, designated essentially arbitrarily as responsible for the ills of the world, and bond together as a solidaristic community of the (self-)righteous in the act of executing them together. And if they can’t actually be there for the event itself, they applaud as spectators from a distance.

That is just what we have seen since October 7. The way hordes of young Americans have sided with Hamas shows, Brahm correctly states, their “grotesque miseducation.” Indeed so — and it’s exactly what had to happen once our educational “leaders” decided to allow activists to use classrooms not to impart bodies of knowledge to students, but to indoctrinate them into their belief systems.

Read the whole essay.