The vast, left-wing conspiracy

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) appeared on CNN Tuesday night, unwittingly offering a useful distillation of the right’s consideration of political violence.

“You need to get your facts right,” Cruz told host Kaitlan Collins after she brought up the killing of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman. “The assassin there was not a right-wing assassin, acting on a political motive. The assassin there was someone who had been an appointee of Tim Walz, and he was a deranged lunatic.”

“Yes,” he continued, “there are deranged lunatics who attack people, both right and left. But if you look at murders carried out for political agendas, they are overwhelmingly on the left.” In addition to the killing of Charlie Kirk (the incident that prompted Cruz’s appearance), the senator cited the attempts on Donald Trump’s life in 2024 and the “assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh,” in which a plotter turned himself in before committing any act of violence.

Cruz’s description of Vance Boelter — the man accused of killing Hortman, her husband and shot another Democratic legislator — is false. He attempts to tie Boelter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz by describing him as an “appointee,” but Walz merely extended Boelter’s term on a state board as he did scores of other prior appointees. Boelter is a Trump supporter who engaged in “targeted political assassinations” according to a Justice Department official.

But this is the play. In order to rebut the abundant evidence that extremist murders are more likely to be driven by members of the political right (including two deaths that occurred on the same day as Kirk’s), those murders are downplayed in significance or dismissed as the work of isolated, mentally ill actors. Murders committed by people driven by left-wing ideologies (as appears to be the case with the Kirk killing) are presented as part of a concentrated political project.

This is why accusations against the left so often focus on the word “they.” If these acts of violence are downstream from left-wing politics, there’s an implied chain of influence that often proves impossible to define clearly. So instead it’s left as nebulous: They did this, through whatever means the right seeks to cast as unacceptable.

It is true that public attention can drive targeted violence as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years. But that’s different than arguing that violence is the desired outcome of that attention, much less that this is primarily an issue on the left.

The emergence (re-emergence, really) of this idea that the left is engaged in a coordinated project to destroy the right by whatever means it can reminded me of research I wrote about in my 2023 book, “The Aftermath.” (You should probably buy the book. The bit below is in chapter four.)

Here’s what I wrote:

America’s non-White population is now mostly not Black. This makes it facially odd to assume that a theoretical erosion of White power will benefit a conglomerated group of non-Whites, as though the zero-sum calculus of politics will reward “non-Whites” as a group. Finding this idea puzzling, a group of researchers including New York University’s Eric Knowles examined precisely that assumption — and found clear evidence that it was one being made particularly by White Republicans.

“When you think about it, what does it mean for White Americans to become a minority? Well, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to not be the largest single group anymore — unless you sort of lump everybody else together,” he said when we spoke by phone. (Indeed, even in the Census Bureau’s projection for the population in 2060, Whites still outnumber Black and Hispanic U.S. residents combined.) “So there’s ‘us’, and then there’s ‘everyone else’, and that ‘everyone else’ forms some sort of coherent whole. That would be, it seems to us, kind of a prerequisite to feeling that sense of threat. If you think that you’re still the largest player in the game, and it’s just that there are a lot of other, smaller players, it’s not logical to feel all that threatened by it.”

Knowles and his colleagues conceived of a way to measure what they dubbed the sense of “minority collusion,” the idea that non-White Americans have a shared dislike and jealousy of Whites and that they work together to peel away power and resources to which Whites are entitled. They surveyed a nationally representative pool of White people multiple times from 2015 to 2018, asking them to respond to statements like “minorities may disagree about some things, but one thing they agree on is that they don’t like White people” or “different minority groups are willing to cooperate with each other in order to take power away from White people.” The research team also offered statements explicitly endorsing White identity politics like “Blacks, Latinos, and Asians often vote for politicians from their same racial group because that’s who has their best interests in mind; Whites should not be criticized for doing the same thing.” 

“What we ended up finding,” Knowles said, “was that there was a marked increase in agreement with the idea that minority collusion is happening over the course of the survey.” But, importantly, that increase “was driven only by an increase in this minority collusion belief among White Republicans.”

Knowles’ research looked at a specific us-versus-them framing. But you can see the parallel: If they are not us, they must be part of a them that is out to get us. Even when it doesn’t make sense to assume that disparate elements of the opposition are working together, because they are perceived as the opposition they are assumed to be acting in concert.

Earlier in his conversation with Collins, Cruz alleged that moneyed interests were behind the left-wing violence they were committing.

“The Black Lives Matter and antifa riots all over the country, there was real money behind that,” he said. “The anti-Israel, antisemitic riots on college campuses, there was real money behind that. The open border riots we saw in L.A., and across the country, there’s real money behind that. I’m not the only person who noticed that at the antisemitic protests, on college campuses, many of the tents all matched. And so, what I’m urging the Department of Justice to do is look at who’s funding it.”

The “antifa riots”? OK.

It’s helpful that he mentioned the tents thing because it was nonsense that was seized upon by the right in its effort to imply a coordination that simply didn’t exist. The “real money” he describes almost invariably gets traced back to contributions from donors to organizations that supported often completely non-violent protests. But he and his allies work backward to construct a conspiracy where none otherwise exists because it allows them to impugn their political opponents. Drawing attention that, in the past, has led to right-wing political violence.

Except that political violence isn’t something done by us. It’s just something they foment and celebrate as part of their left-wing collusion and conspiracy. Right, senator?

Photo: The most powerful person in America, holding court with allies and aides. (White House/Flickr)