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Liberal elites created a permission structure for extremism.
Manhattan Institute investigator Stu Smith recently posted a clip on X showing New York activist Nicolás Vargas speaking on a 2022 Zoom meeting with other tenant advocates, including a future adviser to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Cea Weaver. Mr. Vargas is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and advocates “a world without landlords.” If politicians don’t enact the policies his supporters want, he told the meeting attendees, “we will kick them out or throw them out in the street and guillotine them.”
What struck me wasn’t so much the words he spoke (political extremists say a lot of inflammatory things) as the way he said them. His tone was matter of fact, businesslike. It was as if he were addressing a political strategy session, which in fact he was, and letting members know that cutting off the heads of opponents was one of several tactics they might consider. Far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker once made a splash saying something similar about killing landlords: “Let the streets soak in their f— red capitalist blood!” he exclaimed in an old video that occasionally resurfaces (more recently, he said the clip is “obviously hyperbolic”).
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the former editor of Popular Mechanics, where he helped reposition that century-old brand to become a major voice on technological issues.