Abolish the filibuster.  Codify Roe.  Expand the Supreme Court.  Protect abortion rights by any means necessary.  We need all the above.  This is an emergency.

“Squad” House member Cori Bush, Tweet, May 3, 2022

The Democrats, as usual, see the current situation as an emergency.

It is, as always, so bad that many of them call to use “any means necessary” to get “all” of what they want, even overturning longstanding American norms like the filibuster, the electoral college and a nine-member Supreme Court. 

The House “Justice Democrats,” which includes “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, Raúl Grijalva, Pramila Jayapal, and Rashida Tlaib, see socialist Ocasio-Cortez as “the opening act in an ambitious plan to ... re-imagine liberal politics in America ... by whatever means necessary,” an implicit threat to use violence if they cannot get what they want any other way.

There is also a “civil rights” group active in Michigan and California called “By Any Means Necessary,” or BAMN (the full name is "Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigration Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary") that took their name from Malcolm X’s 1964 statement, “We want freedom by any means necessary ... justice by any means necessary ... equality by any means necessary.”   When BAMN pledges to use “any means necessary” to get their way, they mean it.  BAMN members have been accused of harassing petition circulators on Phoenix streets and filming people who sign petitions in order to bully them not to sign petitions they don’t like.  Even the very liberal ACLU has reported that the FBI has investigated BAMN for potential involvement in unspecified "terrorist activities."

 Bobby Seale of the Chicago 8 adopted Malcolm X’s slogan “Freedom by any means necessary” as a motto for their new organization, the Black Panthers.  Seale advocated violence and Newton vowed to “live by the gun.” Seale was later charged with the 1969 murder of a Black Panther suspected of being a police informant but the trial ended with a hung jury.  Newton was widely believed to be responsible for several murders.

            Within days of George Bush taking office in 2001, Democrat Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.), who always tried to look respectable to get elected, vowed to use “whatever means necessary” to defeat Bush’s judicial nominees. 

            Unfortunately, the expression “any means necessary” has a long association with violence.  It was first used, invoking the Marxist idea of the class struggle, by French existentialist/communist, Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands,

[W]e will abolish lies ... by eradicating class by any means necessary.

                  Act 5, Scene 3 (1963 translation)

The play revolves around a conflict between communist factions in Illyria, a fictional Eastern European country.  In the play, a communist, Hugo, is told that a party leader, Hoederer, who is very charming and trusting, has pursued talks with non-socialist groups to form a post-war coalition government. That is, Hoederer has committed the sin of compromising with his political opponents to achieve something positive.  Hugo sees this as treacherous and plans to assassinate Hoederer.  Welcome to the compassionate “social justice,” actually injustice, Utopian brotherhood of communists and socialists.  Hugo eventually murders Hoederer, not because of political disagreements, but because he sees his wife kiss Hoederer.   One of the morals of Sartre’s play seems to be that once one decides to start killing people because of their political beliefs, it becomes easy to start killing them for anything, perhaps even jealousy. 

Sartre’s expression was soon picked up by Martinican intellectual Frantz Fanon.  In his 1960 Address to the Accra Positive Action Conference titled "Why we use violence,” Fanon stated that the colonized people of Martinique “are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary.”             

Since the call to use “any means necessary” is a call to use violence, if that is the only way to get what one wants, and since that expression has in fact been used by various violent revolutionary figures and movements, its use by Democrats like Daschle and “Squad” members is also a threat to use violence and threats of violence to get what they want. Indeed, the expression, “by any means necessary” is often accompanied by an image of a black fist to threaten racial violence or a red fist to emphasize socialist or communist violence. 

Against the background of this history of leftist calls to violence, it is no accident that a man has just been arrested for attempted murder near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and most of the news media do not find particularly interesting, because Kavanaugh might not vote the way the would-be killer wants.  In 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer, unhappy that Democrats might not get their way, threatened SCOTUS Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch that if they did not render the decisions he wants, they will “have released the whirlwind ... and would not know what hit them.”

Further, despite the fact that there is a law on the books prohibiting protesting outside homes of judges to influence judicial decisions, which seems to have slipped Attorney General Merrick Garland’s and President Biden’s minds, angry mobs currently protest outside the homes of SCOTUS Justices Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas. 

In 2018, a Bernie Sanders supporter shot and almost killed House leader Steve Scalise and wounded two other people.  A violent Antifa mob smashed the diminutive gay conservative Andy Ngo in the head with a cement block causing considerable damage for the unforgivable sin of filming one of their events (that is, documenting what they are).  In the “Summer of Love”, BLM and other leftist organization killed up to 18 people and did as much as $2 billion in damage, not that the Democrats or news media, who, apparently saw all that destruction and death as “mostly peaceful”, took much notice.  Senator Rand Paul and his wife were attacked by angry mobs upon leaving the White House and believed they would have been killed were it not for (late) police intervention.  The pro-abortion group, “Jane’s Revenge,” warns: “If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either. We are everywhere,” etc., etc.

The use of violence and threats are not the acts of isolated deranged leftists but are a central part of leftist strategies. When leftists say they will do whatever is necessary to get what they want, one should believe them. They will smear opponents with Russia hoaxes to win elections, censor and cancel political opponents and conservative media, use massive unverifiable mail-in ballots and an army of “mules” to cheat on elections, politicize government institutions and the “news media” to persecute political opponents, create transparently false narratives to cause hatred for America and divide the racial groups, pervert and indoctrinate children for their own ends, threaten people, including judges and other members of government, to influence decisions and policy, and that's hardly all of it. 

Their own words make clear that they see no limit to what they are prepared to do, as Andy Ngo, Steve Scalise, Amy Barrett and her children, Neil Gorsuch, and many victims from the Left’s “Summer of Love” and on the streets in Democrat-run cities around the country already know. The message is clear:  Oppose us and you get a BAMN in the face ... or worse. 

Image: N.C. Mallory, via Flickr // CC BY-ND 2.0