When Speech Becomes Violence—and Violence Becomes Speech

Recent events in Minneapolis show how political loyalty can make offensive speech seem like violence—and actual violence seem like protest.

A few months ago, I wrote that the deeper danger of political tribalism is that it changes what honesty feels like. Recent events in Minneapolis suggest a further danger: Tribal loyalty can also change what counts as violence.

The reversal often begins with a metaphor. A speaker uses words that are racist, demeaning or deliberately provocative, and those words are called violence. Then someone strikes the speaker, chases him through the street or climbs onto his vehicle to attack him. The blow becomes protest, resistance, confrontation—or simply the predictable result of what the speaker said.

This is more than sloppy language. It reverses the moral sequence. Once speech is treated as the first physical blow, the person who throws the actual punch can claim the role of defender. The tribe calls words violence when spoken by its enemies—and calls violence expression when committed by its allies.

Words can cause harm without becoming physical force

Words can cause real harm. They can humiliate, intimidate and isolate. A threat can make someone fear for his life. Sustained harassment can shrink the places where a person feels safe enough to work, worship or walk. Hate speech can damage the civic standing of the people it targets. None of that is imaginary. Recognizing it does not require us to pretend that words and blows are the same thing.

Serious moral judgment depends on distinctions. An insult is not a threat. A threat is not necessarily incitement. Incitement is not the same act as the assault it may help produce. Speech, driving, chemical spray, property damage and assault are different kinds of conduct. Each must be judged on its own evidence and assigned to the person responsible for it. Several wrongs can occur in the same confrontation, and different adults can be responsible for each one.

American law keeps these categories separate for a reason. In Brandenburg v. Ohio—a case involving a Ku Klux Klan leader—the Supreme Court held that even advocacy of force cannot be prohibited unless it is directed to producing imminent lawless action and likely to do so. The rule is demanding because it was written for people we dislike. Without it, government could turn offensiveness into a crime whenever politics made that convenient.

The legal rule does not answer every moral question. But it protects a basic distinction our political language is losing: Explaining why a crowd was angry is not the same as excusing what people in that crowd chose to do.

Minneapolis has now watched this happen twice

Jake Lang is almost engineered to defeat principled thinking. In January, he came to Minneapolis with roughly ten supporters, anti-Muslim slogans and a threat to burn a Quran before marching toward Cedar-Riverside. Hundreds of counterprotesters met him. Water balloons and snowballs gave way to shoving and punches. He was chased for several blocks and reached a hotel bleeding from the back of his head. Some people in the crowd urged others to let him leave. Black and Muslim men helped shield him as blows were thrown.

Those rescuers understood something much of the later rhetoric did not. Lang’s contempt for their community did not cancel his humanity, and protecting him did not endorse his message. Their restraint was not weakness. In that crowd, it was moral independence.

Some of the coverage told a more triumphant story. Lang was ‘chased out.’ His rally was ‘quashed.’ One activist outlet used that language while also reporting that protesters punched and kicked him along the route and that another attendee was struck repeatedly in the head with a wooden pole. The violence was in the story. The verbs told readers to cheer it.

Lang returned in August with another deliberately inflammatory message. Beforehand, Mayor Jacob Frey urged residents to let Lang’s ‘lame-ass racist rally’ fade into irrelevance. Lang and six associates arrived in two vehicles that moved onto the sidewalk amid a gathered crowd. A confrontation followed, and police arrested all seven on probable cause of riot.

Prosecutors later declined felony charges. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office cited extensive evidence of communication and logistical coordination between MPD and Lang’s security detail and concluded that it could not prove the required criminal intent. The officer struck by one of the vehicles reported that he did not believe the driver saw what was happening. City prosecutors may still consider lesser charges.

That sequence matters. An arrest is not a verdict. The available evidence does not justify saying that Lang deliberately drove into the crowd or committed felony riot. His message remained racist, degrading and designed to provoke outrage. Those are different judgments, and collapsing them is precisely the habit at issue here.

The charging decision does not erase the choices made by other people in the crowd. Police said people associated with both sides used chemical irritants. Objects were thrown as officers tried to clear the vehicles. Three officers were injured, one briefly requiring hospital care. Four people outside Lang’s group were arrested, including one man on suspicion of assault.

That man had been dressed as Spider-Man. Video showed him jumping onto the back of Lang’s truck and attacking him. Within two days, a fundraiser organized on his behalf had collected more than $46,000. Its authors called him a Minneapolis ‘antifascist superhero,’ said police had allowed ‘the Nazi’ to escape, and asked the city to stand up for Spider-Man as he had stood up for it. You cannot make this up, although apparently you can give it an origin story.

The costume is absurd. The moral casting is not. It supplied a hero before anyone had to judge the conduct. The attack became political expression. Meanwhile, some protesters treated the police decision to keep a crowd from pulling Lang from his vehicle as proof that MPD ‘protects white supremacy.’ The same department that made a path for Lang to leave arrested him later, away from the crowd. Prosecutors then reviewed the evidence and declined felony charges. None of those actions contradicts the others. Equal enforcement means protecting someone from a mob, arresting him when probable cause exists and declining a charge when the evidence cannot support it.

How language erases adult choice

Psychologist Albert Bandura called this process moral disengagement: the mental moves that let people keep thinking of themselves as decent while excusing conduct they would normally condemn. The harmful act gets a worthy purpose. Softer language cleans it up. Responsibility shifts to an authority, a crowd or the victim. Soon the person who struck back no longer sees a choice. He sees something the other person made him do.

Research by psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner points to another part of the problem. People tend to cast someone as either a moral agent—the person doing harm—or a moral patient—the person being harmed. Once someone is fixed in our minds as the villain, we have a harder time seeing him as a victim, even when the next act is done to him. Lang’s record and rhetoric make him an obvious wrongdoer. They do not make him impossible to assault.

That is why the word incited does so much hidden work in political commentary. Used loosely, it strips agency from everyone except the hated speaker. The crowd becomes weather. Its violence arrives like a storm Lang summoned. But the people in these videos are adults, not weather. Provocation can explain their anger. It cannot turn their choices into someone else’s responsibility.

Frey did not completely ignore violence by others. Afterward, he affirmed First Amendment rights and briefly referred to people who were ‘inciting some form of violence.’ But his public emphasis fell overwhelmingly on Lang’s driving and his alleged role in the riot. Prosecutors later declined felony charges after reviewing evidence not available during the first public accounts. What remained missing was a sentence public leaders usually find quickly when a sympathetic figure is attacked: No amount of offensive speech gives a mob the right to administer punishment.

County Attorney Mary Moriarty handled the legal distinction more carefully. She called Lang’s actions ‘despicable and disgusting’ but declined felony charges because her office could not prove the required intent. Moral condemnation did not become a substitute for evidence. That is what the rule of law requires when the suspect is someone the community despises.

Now change the name. Imagine Hasan Piker arriving in a conservative town to deliver remarks the local population considered hateful. If a far-right crowd surrounded his vehicle, sprayed irritants, climbed aboard, punched him and then celebrated the attacker as a hero, progressive leaders would rightly reject the claim that Piker had incited his own beating. Police protection would be understood as a duty, not an endorsement. Attention would remain on the adults who chose violence. Changing the speaker’s name should not change the rule.

The right does this, too

This way of thinking is not a left-wing invention. The right has repeatedly laundered the violence of January 6 through the language of patriotism and persecution. In partisan retellings, assaults on police disappear behind a story of patriotic victims pursued by a corrupt state. In 2025, the White House proclamation pardoning or commuting the sentences of January 6 defendants described their prosecutions as a ‘grave national injustice.’ The facts differ sharply from Minneapolis. The moral maneuver does not: Violence by the tribe becomes political expression, and accountability becomes oppression.

That hypocrisy does not excuse the hypocrisy in Minneapolis. It reveals the danger of making rules partisan. Each side believes it faces an emergency created by uniquely dangerous people. Each can point to real grievances. And each is tempted to call its own violence reluctant defense while treating the other side’s violence as proof of what those people really are.

Fair judgment does not require us to pretend all speech is benign or every clash is morally symmetrical. It requires us to keep the sequence straight. Name the speech. Name the threat, if there is one. Name the vehicle movement, the chemical spray, the thrown object and the punch. Then assign each act to the adult who chose it. Context can affect judgment. It cannot become a blank check to transfer responsibility.

Tribalism does not only tell us which facts to believe. Eventually, it tells us which rules apply, which actions deserve condemnation and which people are permitted to break them.

If we want rules instead of tribal permissions, we must resist the category reversal. Words can wound, threaten and, in narrow circumstances, incite. Violence can carry a political message. But none of that makes words and violence interchangeable, and no metaphor gets to decide who may hit whom. We should name each act for what it is, hold each adult responsible for the choices they made and refuse to let hatred do our moral bookkeeping.