by Victor Davis Hanson
In the behind schedule 1850s, “bleeding Kansas” was a term used to describe the escalating cycle of violence as the proxies of the Union and the future Confederacy fought among themselves over whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or slave-owning state.
As attacks and killings escalated, the radicals set an agenda. The logical next step was the horrors of Fort Sumter and Bull Run.
Those calling for restraint and peaceful solutions were considered faint and treacherous. Instead, they praised the bandits and brutalists as true idealists and patriots, the true “base” of their parties.
Over the past few years, we have seen a rising tide of leftist assassins and would-be assassins: James Hodgkinson, Luigi Mangione, James Crooks, Ryan Routh, Elias Rodriguez, and Tyler Robinson, who have targeted House Republican leadership, CEOs, Donald Trump, Jews, and Charlie Kirk. Leftists spent months destroying or burning everything related to the Tesla brand, and at times attacked individual Tesla owners with impunity. Jews walked in the shadows on campuses as crowds cheered the Hamas killers.
From June to October 2020, Antifa and BLM-led riots resulted in 35 deaths, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 arrests, and 1,500 injured police officers. On January 6, five people died as a result of violence, including four on the protesting side. Yet while the federal government promptly and often over-incarcerated both violent and peaceful protesters in 2021, nearly all of the 14,000 protesters and rioters in 2020 were released by leftist Blue City and federal prosecutors and judges.
ICE officers and facilities remain under siege in many major cities. Within the current leftist legitimization of violence, the Democratic Party is now adopting an incredible transmission of pre- and post-Confederation ethos. Continuing large Democrats are calling for their resistance to take to the streets, if need be, to go below the “gutter” and “let your rage fuel you.”
The demagogic, anti-ICE sycophancy of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson is a nullificationist to the core and supremacy of state rights.
New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani, in the spirit of Jefferson Davis, recently summed up the leftist resistance best when he boasted that he hoped to completely disassociate New York City’s local government from the power of the federal government – at least in the compulsory rather than the beneficiary sense.
But don’t right wingers in leftist states also approve of crooked lower federal court judges who create and apply all kinds of edicts to stop the enforcement of federal law?
Democrat-appointed judges confidently and accurately assume that: 1) they will certainly be reversed, but they may well continue to fabricate laws and create jurisdictions and rules to delay and obstruct administration; 2) that unlike their Democratic supporters who opportunistically ignore federal authority, the target Trump administration will abide by their federal rulings until they are overturned; 3) that any loss of judges’ reputation as a result of their biased and unhealthy rulings is more than made up for by their fresh popular status among Democrats as fanatical Never Trumper activists.
Blue state elected officials, both local and statewide, believe not only that the federal government has no jurisdiction to enforce the laws in their locales, but also that they themselves have the right, even the obligation, to exploit their own resources to thwart them.
However, blue states and cities have a specific concept of “states’ rights.” Under Obama, Democrats once cheered the federal government’s blocking of former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s efforts to exploit state resources to enforce federal immigration law, something the open-border Obama White House has flatly refused to do.
How strange, then, that the left supports federal supremacy when it chooses not to enforce its own laws, but opposes it when it respects and enforces federal laws.
Of course, if any red city, county, or state declared itself immune to the Democrat-led federal government—for example, local governments ignoring federal gun registration laws or endangered species mandates—then the left would exploit the full force of federal law to crush such “state rightists.”
This fresh, unilateral, left-wing states’ rights movement was also born during the first Trump administration. Subsequently, approximately 600 state and local “sanctuary city” jurisdictions declared that they would not turn over arrested criminal aliens who were in the U.S. illegally to federal authorities.
Today, local Democratic officials from Chicago to Los Angeles shamelessly boast that not only will their own police forces not assist in the deportation of detained or illegal aliens, but they will also often actively oppose federal law enforcement – whether by offering street shelter to violent anti-ICE protesters in Portland or by forbidding Chicago-area police not to come to the aid of besieged and blocked ICE officers.
Unhinged Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is now bragging that she wants local California officials to arrest federal ICE officers. The former Speaker of the House, however, does not specify what kind of “encounter” will occur when these armed federal officers are lawfully enforcing the law and former armed state officials are breaking the law in an attempt to stop them. Bloody Kansas? Mini-Fort Sumter?
The last time such a brazen state effort to invalidate a federal law occurred was in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas (President Eisenhower vs. Governor Orval Faubus); in 1962 in Oxford, Mississippi (President Kennedy vs. Governor Ross Barnett); and in 1963 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (President Kennedy vs. George Wallace). Like their current counterparts, all such governors defended states’ rights, condemned federal meddling in their own affairs, and counted on the people of their own states to protest and intervene in their common anti-federalist and nullificationist agendas.
Social media is currently ablaze, as are street protests, attacks on federal officials, and defiant calls for state and local residents to exploit any means necessary to stop federal law enforcement. State officials smear federal officers as “Nazis” and “Gestapo,” then up the ante by creating electronic “ICE lodgers” through which illegal aliens and their supporters can evade, harass, and place federal officers in physical danger. The logical end to the brutal plans of California nullificationist officials will be ICE officers either injured or dead.
That 80-90% of the currently arrested cohorts of illegal aliens have either prior criminal histories or outstanding deportation orders seems irrelevant. The current nullificationists’ cause is not illegal immigrants per se, but rather the exploit of state resources to oppose the Trump federal administration, which is acting legally as agents of the U.S. government.
It’s no wonder that John Brown, the antebellum instigator and assassin, became a popular icon of blue state rights precisely because he was willing to kill his opponents. The violent leftist “John Brown Gun Club” is now mainstream. Howard University professor Stacey Patton recently urged white liberals to “be like John Brown. Ask yourself, what am I willing to burn so that someone else can breathe?”
She apparently favored the kind of violence that characterized Brown’s armed raid on Harpers Ferry, which helped spark the Civil War, or his earlier Pottawatomie massacre in 1856, during which he oversaw the execution of five pro-Southern settlers.
The escalation of violence in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland is eerily reminiscent of the antecedents of the “Bleeding Kansas” frenzy of the behind schedule 1850s, in which local law enforcement often ignored or joined in the violence of ad hoc outlaws, sometimes in opposition to the federal government.
Much like the bloodshed in 19th-century Kansas, the current activist left on the streets and on social media makes no effort to hide his joy at Charlie Kirk’s death, hide his disappointment that Trump survived two assassination attempts, or deny that the killer Luigi Mangione is now a popular icon of the left.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, whose incompetence and left-wing attitude ensured the fire in Los Angeles, seems unconcerned about the fate of her failed city as she poses on the barricades every day as an opponent of federal law.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has no answer to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail disaster. He remains indifferent to the state government’s responsibility for dozens of terrible forest and brush fires.
Perennial candidate Newsom is not concerned about the state’s crippling insurance, gas and electricity costs, California’s record high gas and income taxes, its now chronic multi-billion dollar budget deficit or its $1.6 trillion unfunded liabilities.
Instead, Newsom comes to life only to publish the news that the federal Secretary of Homeland Security is about to have a “bad day” (“Kristi Noem is going to have a bad day today. You’re welcome, America”) or that he is willing to punch the President in the face (“We’re going to fight and punch this tyrant in the face”) or punch his Republican opponents (“Let’s punch these sons of bitches in the face.” mouth”).
In summary, officials threaten and sanction violence against ICE.
When federal officers challenge them, the brutal street thugs flee to the protection of sympathetic local police.
If an ICE officer is under siege, he has no confidence that local or state officials will come to his aid and confront his attackers.
Killers are praised; their victims are vilified.
So we are Bleeding Kansas.
Democrats and the left are moving forward regardless – even if they know where their madness ultimately leads.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is an American military historian, columnist, former professor of classical philology and researcher of old warfare.
