Conservative Pundit Shares Close Encounter With ‘Politically Violent Attacks’ at Senate Panel Hearing

Prominent conservative commentator Michael Knowles sounded off on the growing threat of political violence at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. 

“The federal government must act now to stop the consistent and accelerated threat of leftist terrorism. For a legislator to deny the threat and neglect the remedy might once have been chalked up to ignorance. Today, it is nothing less than a complicity,” Knowles declared in his remarks before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.

The title of the hearing was “Politically Violent Attacks: A Threat to Our Constitutional Order.” In addition to Knowles, it featured testimony from Chad Wolf of the America First Policy Institute and a former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Daniel Hodges, a Washington, D.C., police officer; William Braniff, executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) in the School of Public Affairs at American University; and Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism with the Center for Security Policy.

Near the beginning of his opening statement, Knowles outlined his position on whether the political Left or Right was more responsible for the violence flaring in the United States. The following are four takeaways from his testimony.

1. Left ‘More Violent’ Than the Right

“[L]est I be accused of partisan invective … no less an emblem of American liberalism than the Atlantic magazine published an article citing a recent study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admitting that the Left is more violent today than the right,” Knowles said.  

The political commentator then recounted his own brush with violent protesters that occurred in April 2023. The Daily Wire host had been invited to debate the issue of transgenderism at the University of Pittsburgh. Before the event, dozens of left-wing protesters, including some that had their faces covered, burned an effigy of the podcaster.

2. Encountering Violence, Up Close and Personal

“[A]s the Pittsburgh [fire department] put out my burning effigy, an Antifa operative named Brian DiPippa, hiding behind his wife, Krystal, rolled two smoke bombs under police barricades,” Knowles said.  He then recounted how [Brian] DiPippa threw a firework at police officers, which resulted in several members of the police being burned and “life-altering injuries to a female officer.”

He ultimately received five years in prison while his wife was sentenced to three years’ probation. Knowles expressed frustration at the sentencing.

3. Punishment Must Be Commensurate With Crime

“I think we should all be able to agree that throwing an explosive at a group of people is no mere minor indiscretion. That is a very serious crime. That’s attempted murder, the kind of crime that merits life in prison,” Knowles said.

4) Backing Candidate Despite Violent Rhetoric Is Wrong

Knowles later pointed out in the hearing that Sen. Corey Booker, D-N.J., had endorsed Democratic Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones candidate, despite the fact that Jones had said in text messages that he hoped a former Virginia House speaker would get “two bullets to the head.”

“You certainly cannot have law enforcement officers who would engage in this kind of violent rhetoric against half of their constituents. So long as anyone stands by an endorsement such as that, their words are meaningless. They are shedding crocodile tears on the topic of political violence,” he said.

Reflecting on the gunshot slaying of a friend, conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, Knowles said, “There was no more gracious, generous, or charitable debater on college campuses than Charlie Kirk, and he always endeavored to hear out the other side … to give them the benefit of the doubt. And he was killed for it. He was killed for ideological reasons. And it has to be an inflection point.”

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