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I'm having a hard time writing this little intro.

Normally, I try to introduce our Saturday matinee podcast in the context of my life or our shared history or something that links yesterday with today.

And I'm going to try and do the same thing here,

but today's topic is centered on political violence.

And here in the United States lately, we've seen recent and horrible acts of ideologically motivated killings that has me and probably many of you wondering what is going on.

I have no answer.

Except the crooked consolation that political violence has always been with us,

sometimes reaching heights that far eclips our current tragedies.

We have the assassinations and violence of 1968, leaving Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy

murdered and Chicago's streets stained with blood.

Following that, in an 18-month period from 1971 to

1972, there were more than 2,500 bombings in the United States, almost five a day. Another

spate of bombings throughout the World War I era gave way to the Red Summer in 1919, a fever of

racial massacres in dozens of cities that likely left

hundreds dead. And we've had four U.S. presidents assassinated, making the American chief

executive the most dangerous job in the country purely in terms of the percent who survive

it. So yeah, American political violence is not new, and what we're seeing now,

inconceivably to us today, perhaps, is not extraordinary by comparison. Still, it's reprehensible

and shocking because, thankfully, political violence is still rare. On today's Saturday matinee,

...