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While mainstream liberals want to deny it, the extreme left is a real and growing threat.
Here is one of the hardest things for my liberal friends to accept: Some of our fellow Americans really do hate this country. In fact, they hate the whole Western liberal tradition. They’d like to see democratic governments and free-market economies—especially ours—torn down. By any means necessary.
The radicals I’m talking about include dedicated Marxist revolutionaries and hardcore Islamists, two groups that openly advocate for the violent overthrow of Western governments (and that happily work together). This collection of anti-American extremists isn’t huge. But it’s more than big enough to worry about. Look at how many antifa-style operatives manage to show up at leftist protests around the country. Mayhem—including arson, assault and even gunfire—often follows.
But the mainstream left doesn’t believe these people really exist. In the first 2020 presidential debate, candidate Joe Biden insisted antifa is just “an idea.” Or, even if these groups do exist, my liberal friends tell me, their threat to our society is minimal; what we should really worry about is right-wing violence. (Yes, that’s a problem too, but it doesn’t mitigate the growing threat from the left. Two things can be bad at once.)
When extremists commit terrible crimes, the apologists say, they must have had a good reason. When a would-be suicide bomber tried to blow up a Jewish preschool in Michigan last month, the Guardian rushed to explain that some of his family members had been killed in an Israeli missile attack. The article didn’t mention that the brothers who were targeted were known to be members of the Hezbollah militia.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.
