Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how political violence has always been woven into the fabric of American

life and who gets to decide what counts as violence in the first place.

We'll hear about presidential assassinations, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the move

bombing in Philadelphia, and the

long history of state-sanction violence. And I'll discuss the only real way to bend the curve

back away from endemic violence in the U.S. For those looking for a quick overview,

the sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today include Taylor Lorenz, the PBS News Hour, Front Burner,

the Chauncey DeVega Show, and Democracy Now. Then, in the additional deeper dives half of the show,

there will be more in five sections. Section A, The Framing Wars, Section B, the Long American

Tradition, Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness, section D, the right-wing engine,

and section E, the system, and what comes next. And now, on to the show.

When political leaders and the media wring their hands about political violence, they're not actually talking about violence in any universal sense.

They're talking about violence specifically against elites or people who look like them or people who maintain these existing power structures.

The violence that is already a daily feature of life for poor,

immigrant, black, disabled, and queer communities is completely invisible to them. Police tear gassing,

a crowd of teenagers demanding accountability for the murder of George Floyd is never deemed

political violence. Federal agents shooting pepper balls at medics in Portland is not seen as political violence.

But the second a right-wing figure is harmed, it becomes a crisis for democracy on cable news.

This double standard, of course, has always been there.

And it's why so many people, especially in the Middle East and other countries that we've inflicted

horrific levels of violence upon upon hate the American government.

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