Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. Today we're joined joined by Tal Fortgang to discuss his story from our

winter issue, The Rise of Civil Terrorism. I'm Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Tal is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His writing on law, political theory,

religion, and culture has appeared frequently in

City Journal and also in commentary, National Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

He's also published legal scholarship in the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty and the Texas Review

of Law and Politics. So, Tal, welcome. Thank you, Brian.

It's great to be here. In this essay, which was in our winter issue, the rise of civil terrorism,

you write that pro-Hamas protesters have invented a new kind of civil disobedience, one whose point

is to punish the public. I wonder if you

could elaborate on that a little bit and what exactly you mean by civil terrorism and how

that concept differs from traditional civil disobedience in American history.

I'll give you a little bit of backstory that will hopefully illuminate why I undertook this analysis and why I think the framework of civil terrorism is so important to understand this phenomenon.

I was living in Washington, D.C. in 2024, and I would walk about a half hour from my apartment in downtown D.C. near the White House where I worked.

Over the course of 2024, I saw on federal property, and of course there's a lot of federal property in downtown D.C.

Parks and statues and monuments and so on.

This federal property was being defaced regularly with truly

obscene pro-Hamas messaging. You know, Hamas is coming. Al-Aksa martyrs are coming. Death to Zionists,

death to America, and so on. And regularly throughout the year, there would be streets closed because of unlicensed

demonstrations, shutting down traffic, which of course is a pattern that was replicated outside

of D.C., notably in New York, in San Francisco, and Chicago in many other cities. And I heard lots of

intelligent people commenting on this phenomenon and

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