There’s no denying that the Far Right — and the newer Woke Right — are filled with stupidity, conspiracies, and bile. But even so, I don’t see from them the sustained hatred I’ve seen from the Left toward the Right for the past half century.
On the Left, there is a long-standing habit of branding anyone to the right of center — even libertarians — as racist, fascist, or literally Hitler. And once you’ve convinced yourself your opponent is a Nazi, violence becomes not only permissible but righteous. This isn’t fringe rhetoric; it’s become embedded in the culture of universities, newsrooms, and activist movements. The dehumanization is systemic, and it frames hostility as virtue.
Meanwhile, the Right, for all its foolishness, hasn’t built a cultural infrastructure dedicated to portraying opponents as evil incarnate. Its cranks and bigots exist, but hatred and violence are not woven into its institutional rhetoric in the same way.
The asymmetry becomes clearer when we look at power. When out of power, the Left has a long history of violent protest and “by any means necessary” politics. When in power, it gravitates toward centralized control: socialism, communism, censorship regimes, coerced conformity, even forced medical compliance. The common thread is mass coercion — violence as policy.
This is the gorilla in the room. To pretend the hostility is symmetrical is to ignore that one side has normalized violence, whether reputational or physical, as a legitimate response to disagreement. There is plenty of nonsense to go around, but the Left’s sustained infrastructure of dehumanization and coercion makes the field fundamentally asymmetrical.