The Sign in the Yard
By TwelveOneForty Staff
For a few years the signs were everywhere, staked into the lawns of America's most comfortable neighborhoods: Hate Has No Home Here. They were meant as a welcome. Somehow, they never quite felt like one. They felt like a verdict, a quiet announcement of who had already been judged, and it is worth asking now what became of the people who planted them and of the movement they thought they were joining.
This month offered an answer. At a live taping of his podcast, Scott Galloway, one of the most popular voices in liberal media, called Elon Musk "a traitor to the West," recalled that "we lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall," and said Mr. Musk should be held to the same standards. He did not use the word execute. He did not need to. Onstage at Madison Square Garden, Dave Chappelle said of the murder of Charlie Kirk, "I shouldn't say this publicly, but I feel better." And Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, hosts of the progressive podcast I've Had It, broke up laughing at a post about digging up Mr. Kirk and "doing it again." At least ten brands walked away from them. They apologized, and then called the people behind the backlash "losers."
It would be comforting to dismiss all this as the excess of a few entertainers. The numbers do not allow it. In a poll taken days after Mr. Kirk was killed, about a quarter of Americans who described themselves as very liberal said violence could be justified to achieve political goals. More than a quarter of Democrats said it would be justified to remove President Trump from office. On campus, nearly eight in ten strong Democrats told the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression that it can be acceptable to shout down or block a speaker. Among all Americans who call themselves very liberal, only 22 percent would say heckling a speaker before he has begun to talk is never acceptable.
The clearest expression of where this road leads is the oldest hatred of all. Elias Rodriguez, accused of murdering two young Israeli Embassy aides outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, had a history in far-left activism and was heard chanting "Free, Free Palestine" as he was led away. On American campuses, the home turf of progressive politics, 42 percent of Jewish students now report experiencing antisemitism, up from 35 percent a year earlier, and a third have stopped displaying anything that identifies them as Jewish. A movement that once promised that hate would have no home here has made a place for it at the table.
None of this means that the left is inherently evil. Its leaders know better, and some have said so. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, has insisted that Americans must "universally condemn" political violence. But he is speaking against a current, and the current is growing stronger.
The left has spent a decade telling itself that it stands against cruelty and for the rule of law. Lawlessness and violence travel together, and they are among the most primitive moral failures we know. Every civilization has had to fight them off, and they have a way of arriving dressed as righteousness. The people laughing this month should look again at the sign in the yard, and ask whom it was really about.
TwelveOneForty is owned by The Westphalian.
