Why the Murderous Left Loves John Brown

A Weird Thing, That

Welcome Back, and Thanks for Reading! Today’s article is something of a follow-up on Tuesday’s article about the attitudes that led to the first Civil War, and why they might lead to a second. In this one, I’ll explain what it is the left so loves about John Brown, a murderous terrorist with no redeeming characteristics. Enjoy! And as always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

One of the oddities of any modern teaching of the United States Civil War is that the murderous terrorist who precipitated it, John Brown, is treated as a hero by nearly every mainstream authority on the war. Teachers vaguely claim he was “fighting slavery” with the “Underground Railroad”. History textbooks say he defended Kansas from invaders to keep it out of the hands of the evil slavers (he murdered innocent families in retribution for a hotel getting burned). Common narratives of the war claim that it was the South’s outraged response to his fight for freedom that showed the Unionists that war was coming.¹

As one commenter told me on X, “The funny thing is, I had no idea how batshit John Brown was until posters on X. In school he was taught like he was this kind [of] MLK-like figure.”² Of course, that ignores the revelations over the past few years about MLK’s abusive treatment of women,³ not to mention his communist connections.⁴ But, still, it gets to a signal truth: John Brown is treated like a charismatic hero who never did wrong, a latter-day prophet who resisted slavery in the name of God and lived a blameless life as he did it. That’s wrong, though it gets to why the left loves one of America’s worst terrorists.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] Why the Murderous Left Loves John Brown

Who Was John Brown

It’s an odd thing at first glance, as Brown was very much not such a warrior priest. As I recently covered, Brown was a lifelong loser. Before his second life as a terrorist, he managed only to lead a business career marked by incessant failures, feuds with business partners, and something between “near fraud” and outright criminality. In fact, he was suicidal by the time his business life drew to a close, and the low point of his business career was him squatting on a farm and threatening the legitimate owner with death, a crime for which he was jailed.⁵

But then, after getting liquidated in the Panic of 1837 and jailed for his armed trespass attempt, Brown conveniently decided to devote himself to the cause of armed resistance to slavery. “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!”, he declared…shortly after the armed trespass incident.⁶

After a few more desultory and failed attempts at business, Brown turned into an armed guerrilla who wreaked bloody havoc in Bleeding Kansas. That bout of savage violence, one that saw Brown and his sons cleaving the extremities off innocent, helpless men as their families watched,⁷ was brought on by the shooting of a sheriff.

Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones was shot when he attempted to arrest anti-slavery settlers, and in response, a gaggle of pro-slavery men burned the town of Lawrence, Kansas. Sheriff Jones survived the shooting, and no one was killed in Lawrence, though an anti-slavery hotel and some houses were burned.

In response, Brown and dozens of armed men stormed into the settlement around Pottawatomie Creek and murdered five men, including three members of the Doyle family. The Doyles weren’t slave-owners, didn’t expect to be, and weren’t involved with the pro-slavery faction. As the widowed Mahala Doyle wrote to John Brown shortly before his execution:

“Altho vengence is not mine, I confess, that I do feel gratified to hear that you ware stopt in your fiendish career at Harper’s Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress, in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free our slaves, we had none and never expected to own one, but has only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children while I feel for your folly. I do hope & trust that you will meet your just reward. O how it pained my Heart to hear the dying groans of my Husband and children if this scrawl give you any consolation you are welcome to it.

Really, his gang murdered the Doyles by cleaving them to pieces with swords, and he fired rounds into the dead bodies, making the murders all the more horrific.

In any case, the 5 murders around Pottawatomie Creek were entirely unjustified and effectively what sparked the bloodiest bout of Bleeding Kansas strife. In fact, it was so bad that it was referred to as the “crowning horror” of the whole Bleeding Kansas period, turning it into one fought with the “policy of extermination or abject submission.”⁸ As another historian noted⁹:

“Now, in a single strike, Brown had almost doubled the body count and inflamed his already rabid foes, who needed little spur to violence. Not for the last time, Brown acted as an accelerant, igniting a much broader and bloodier conflict than had flared before…If it was Brown’s intent to bring on a full-fledge conflict, he got his wish. The number of killings escalated dramatically in the months that followed, earning the territory the nickname ‘Bleeding Kansas.’”

For those murders, and the murderous conflict he spawned, Brown was fêted by New England society. Wealthy New Englanders, whom he delighted in horrifying by brandishing weapons and speaking of the horrors of war,¹⁰ hosted Brown, plied him with funding he used to build an arsenal, and turned the butcher of Pottawatomie Creek (whose subsequent military career had largely been as unsuccessful as his business career, as shown by the rout at Osawatomie¹¹) into an abolitionist folk hero. They turned the butcher into the avatar of their own murderous plans, passions, and conceits.

That was convenient for Brown, as he soon grew bored with the Kansas conflict thanks to the just governance brought by a Southerner, whose commitment to relatively fair elections largely ended the violence.¹² In the end, the anti-slavery faction won, but Brown didn’t care; he wanted race war against the white Southerners, not responsible victories for the free soil coalition.

So, using his contacts in New England, Brown planned an attack on Virginia. A collection of six abolitionist oligarchs¹³ funded him as he bought hundreds of weapons and thousands of pikes for the freed slave army he planned on raising to strike at the slave power, hoping to turn Virginia into Haiti¹⁴ by sparking a state-wide, Nat Turner-style slave rebellion.¹⁵

Those “Secret Six” enthusiastically—though secretly—poured money into his operation as he planned the attack that would spark the white genocide, settling on attacking Harper’s Ferry to capture the federal arsenal with which he could arm the slaves who heard his call and revolted.

In practice, the attack was a debacle. Brown’s desperate gang robbed George Washington’s great-grandnephew (one of Brown’s precepts was that any slave-owner could have his property expropriated without compensation),¹⁶ murdered a freed black train attendant named Heyward Shepherd, and took about a dozen hostages they held in the armory they captured. They then made no real attempt to depart with the captured weapons, didn’t raise a slave rebellion, had brought no food to sustain them in a siege, and were quickly killed or captured by a contingent of US Marines led by Robert E. Lee and JEB Stuart. Then-Col. Lee, describing the incident in an after-action report, noted that Brown received no voluntary aid from the local blacks, and the attack was so buffoonish as to show Brown to be a madman¹⁷:

[Brown] avows that his object was the liberation of the slaves of Virginia, and of the whole South; and acknowledges that he has been disappointed in his expectations of aid from the black as well as white population, both in the Southern and Northern States. The blacks, whom he forced from their homes in this neighborhood, as far as I could learn, gave him no voluntary assistance. The servants of Messrs. Washington and Allstadt, retained at the armory, took no part in the conflict, and those carried to Maryland returned to their homes as soon as released. The result proves that the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or madman, who could only end in failure; and its temporary success, was owing to the panic and confusion he succeeded in creating by magnifying his numbers.

Then came the chaos of Brown’s trial.

For one, Stuart found correspondence of Brown’s exposing his financial backers; the fact that wealthy Bostonians had funded an attempt at sparking a race war in Virginia went over less than well in the Southern states, though the Secret Six escaped punishment.

More importantly, Brown’s trial turned into a fiasco, with the abolitionist press praising the man who murdered a freeman while trying to spark a genocidal revolt as a hero. He was soon hanged, regardless of that New Englander support for genocidal terrorism, and was enshrined as an abolitionist folk hero by devilish abolitionists like Thoreau.

Why the Left Loves Him

So, it’s hard to see at first glance why the left loves him.

For one, he was a Puritan, not an atheistic communist. In fact, he never smoked tobacco or drank alcohol, or even drank tea or coffee. He was reportedly faithful to his wife as well, though his business career was pockmarked by instances of fraud and criminality. So it is weird they support even a nominally religious man, given their hostility to the Christian faith.¹⁸

Similarly, he was mostly ineffective. Other than his slight victory in the Battle of Black Jack, his record as a leader was a total failure. He made the anti-slavery side hated with his butchery in the Pottawatomie massacre, he lost the abolitionist headquarters at Osawatomie, and his Harper’s Ferry raid was a total disaster that led to nothing productive. And all that is on top of his personal life being a total failure.

But still, the left loves the religious fanatic who left behind only a legacy of blood and failure.

The Antifa-affiliated militia groups and domestic terror network¹⁹ called John Brown Gun Clubs are named for him.²⁰ They aim to follow in his footsteps by fighting and killing the police and “fascists” (meaning normal people) on behalf of “equity.”

The Weather Underground saw itself, when it carried out a massive bombing campaign in an attempt to aid the cop-killing Black Liberation Army, as following in the footsteps of John Brown. As Burrough tells it in Days of Rage, the group’s early leader, John Jacobs (JJ), declared that “Every white revolutionary, he argued, was duty-bound to become 1969’s version of John Brown, the Civil War-era antislavery zealot. ‘John Brown! Live like him!’ became JJ’s rallying cry.”

The same is true across the other dark corners of the radical left. The Marxists, the anarchists, and the revolutionaries love John Brown and sing his praises as a “hero.”²¹

They do so for the same reason they love other terrorists, like Nelson Mandela: when they say they want “equity,” what they are saying is they want genocide. Your genocide, to be specific.

This was the case when the Belgian Congo decolonized, where the need for “equality” meant the infliction of the worst sorts of horrors upon the Belgian settlers who had done so much to bring the country its prosperity and the few years of good governance it ever got. Then the American “Black Power” movement picked up Lumumba’s torch and carried it towards race war in the name of decolonization in America.²²

This was the case in Rhodesia, where a century’s worth of investment in the very best form of settlement was brought to a crushing end because the egalitarians demanded equity, and now the former Breadbasket of Africa lives on the verge of famine.

This was the case in South Africa, where the continent’s former preeminent land has gone from First World to Third thanks to government-inflicted anarchotyranny that has turned every investment to dust, put every life at risk, and now risks causing famine as the country embraces Mugabe-style “expropriation without compensation.”

In each case, the story is much the same. Terrorists waged war on the sane but hierarchical government so that they might bring about race communism. Whether Lumumba, Mugabe, or Mandela, they were openly communist terrorists, yet our regime and popular culture supported them in the name of demolishing hierarchy to establish equity.

All this leads back to John Brown.

Yes, he was a lifelong loser who accomplished nothing other than the infliction of misery upon the innocent. But after all, is that not just the epitomization of the average leftist terrorist? All the Antifa goons are spiteful mutants, after all, as were the French Revolutionaries.²³

Yes, he was a religious zealot. But so are they, though their god is the false idol of equality. Yes, he wanted expropriation without compensation of “racist” property. But so do they; it is what they inflicted on our cousins in the decolonized world, after all.

Yes, he wanted to inflict a white genocide upon the South. So do they, though all over America and the decolonized world.

Yes, he wanted to have his allies murder women and children. But so do they; the Weather Underground, for instance, spoke of the need to “kill all white babies” to effect its agenda,²⁴ and the left just gloated as a white woman was stabbed to death on camera in Charlotte by a felon with a pages-long rap sheet, as it has gloated about all the other, horrific murders of like details.

Yes, he was a terrorist. But so are they; by what other term could the Weathermen, the BLA, the FALN, or Antifa be labelled?

Once examined more closely, then, it is clear why the left idolizes John Brown and is resurrecting his bloody legacy²⁵: as a mentally unstable zealot deeply committed to the cause of racial egalitarianism brought about by murderous terrorism, John Brown is the perfect mascot for the radical left.

In his combination of insane delusions, ineffective but brutal violence, and radical attachment to racial egalitarianism, he represents not only what they want to accomplish, but who they are and how they want to accomplish it.

He is their image staring back at them through a mirror encrusted by the grime they have heaped atop our world for the past century and a half: they are more degenerate and of yet worse character than he (hence why his descendant is a homosexual “furry”²⁶), yet otherwise the same.

In short, the left knows that if you are a normal person in the modern day, the murderous and fanatical John Brown would have been bent on murdering you. As they are bent on the same end and are stirred by similar passions, they love him for it and grasp at his legacy of “fighting slavery” as a way of legitimizing their own murderous intentions against all of us.

That must inform what actions we take moving forward. It is not just that all who wear the mantle of John Brown’s legacy are our enemies—whether they be woke teachers or Antifa-type militants—though they are. It is that they will continue self-consciously following in his footsteps, as the Weathermen did, with the goal of bringing about the racial Ragnarok to which he was so deeply committed.

With that in mind, they must be extirpated and must not be allowed to turn themselves into folk heroes. John Brown was powerful not because he was successful in his military efforts—he wasn’t—but because his legend of murderous violence²⁷ in the service of a supposed “good” became overwhelmingly powerful and was an animating myth behind which his more competent allies could unite. His memory became the power with which their bludgeon was wielded. So, as Unionist troops marched South, they sang “John Brown’s Body.”²⁸ The same, to a certain extent, became true of the Weathermen: because they weren’t hanged, they and their legacy lived on and infected the next generations of radicals.²⁹

We mustn’t let them do so again. This time, they must be destroyed, and their memory destroyed with it. There must be no opportunities to parade their ideology before sympathetic reporters in court, no oligarchs given cover to donate to them and turn them into martyrs, no compromise with the evil they represent. That is how the horrible destruction John Brown ushered in—Civil War—could have been prevented; had his memory been damned by all, war might have been averted.

Instead, he became a hero, and the South understood what that meant, and so war followed. We can’t let that happen again. We shouldn’t let that happen again. And so this time, we must destroy them and salt the ground on which they walked.

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Featured image credit: Tarzanswing, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

1. As claimed by the American Battlefield Trust, for example:

When the abolitionist John Brown seized the largest Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October of 1859, he forced the citizens of the United States to reconsider the immorality of the institution of slavery and the injustices enforced by the government. The raid on Harpers Ferry and the resulting execution of Brown was a major turning point in the American abolitionist movement, causing many peaceful abolitionists to accept more militant measures to push for the end of slavery.

An odd thing to say of an executed terrorist and his cause

2. https://x.com/Bowtiedplayer/status/1971205594477724130

3. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/04/how-to-make-sense-of-the-shocking-new-mlk-documents-227042

4. For example, he loved the communist rebels who were murdering civilians in Rhodesia: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1881487334581133768

5. As Fleming tells it in A Disease in the Public Mind:

John Brown acquired the strict, severe Calvinist faith of the seventeenth century, virtually undiluted by later fads and fan-cies. He followed his father’s example and started a tannery near Hudson. But it did not prosper, nor did any of his other businesses. He plunged into ventures such as wool merchandising that ended with everyone angry and/ or disappointed with him, including his chief partner. His manic-depressive mind was constantly attracted to large schemes. But his inability to deal with details, or to get along with business associates, invariably led to disaster. At times, fear of failure made him a near-crook. He took out three different mortgages on one piece of property without informing his lenders.

When things went wrong, the anger bred in John Brown’s soul by his harsh jeremiad-drenched faith exploded. In a dispute over some land in Ohio, he had holed up in a cabin with several of his sons and declared he would kill anyone who set foot on his property. He finally surrendered with. out a fight. As his failures and embarrassments multiplied, he began sinking into depressions, expressing “a strong wish to die.”

6. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/abolitionists-john-brown

7. As Fleming tells it in A Disease in the Public Mind:

The following night, Brown, his four sons, and two other followers dragged five unarmed men out of their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek, known to be a proslavery stronghold. Brown ordered his sons to execute them before the horrified eyes of their wives and children, using two-edged cavalry swords that all but amputated arms and legs and heads. Perhaps most appalling were the murders of James P. Doyle and his two oldest sons, while Doyle’s wife, Mahala, pleaded frantically for their lives and four other bewildered Doyle children watched the butchery. The Doyles were immigrants [who had nothing to do with slavery”

8. Noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottawatomie_massacre#Impact

9. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/abolitionists-john-brown

10. Fleming notes this in pages 224-5 of A Disease in the Public Mind

11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Osawatomie

12. As Fleming tells it in A Disease in the Public Mind:

Another Southern-born territorial governor, appointed by President Buchanan, was continuing the evenhanded policies of his predecessor. Fighting between proslavery and antislavery settlers had dwindled to the vanishing point. Elections to a territorial legislature were held, and free-state voters won overwhelmingly. Peace of sorts seemed to dawn on the military front, though Kansas would soon provide more political shocks.

John Brown had lost interest in this minor war. As his depression caused by the failure of his fundraising campaign lessened, his manic faith in his destiny resumed its grip on his unstable mind.

13. https://www.masshist.org/features/boston-abolitionists/john-brown

14. As Fleming notes, slave owners lived in fear of the 1804 Haitian massacre of whites

15. Brown was inspired by Turner, who led a gang of slaves that mercilessly butchered men, women, and children: https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/death-or-liberty/#:~:text=The%20spirit%20of%20revolt%20exhibited,of%20these%20events%20has%20changed.

16. As Fleming tells it:

[Amongst those Brown wanted was] Colonel Lewis W. Washington, a forty-six year-old great grandnephew of the first president. Brown wanted him not only for the moral effect of his name, but also for a ceremonial sword the colonel owned, which the father of the country had supposedly received from King Frederick the Great of Prussia.

When balding, black-mustached Colonel Washington opened the door in his nightcap and confronted leveled rifles, he stepped back and said, “Possibly you will have the courtesy to tell me what this means.” The leader of the detachment, Aaron Stevens, snarled that they were planning to free all the South’s slaves, and taking him prisoner was a first step. As Washington dressed, the raiders found the ceremonial sword and several rifles, which they also appropriated.

Stevens asked if Colonel Washington had a watch. When he said yes, Stevens held out his hand. “I want it.”

“You shall not have it, sir.” Washington replied.

Stevens demanded all the cash in the house. “I am going to speak to you very plainly, the colonel said. “You told me your purpose was philanthropic. You did not mention it was robbery and rascality.” Colonel Washington was encountering one of the clauses in John Brown’s constitution —all the property of slave owners could be appropriated for the cause.

17. Read the full report here: https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/robert-e-lees-report-lesson.pdf

18. For example, Hillary Clinton said on September 24 that America is being destroyed by white Christian men, as they tend to resist progressivism thanks to their faith. https://x.com/stillgray/status/1970870645581119948

19. https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1969178141210886233

20. https://www.counterextremism.com/supremacy/john-brown-gun-club

21. https://x.com/The_JBS/status/1967346900572709306

22. Covered here:

23. Discussed here:

24. Watch here: https://x.com/Aliathewhite/status/1968700194670674257

25. https://thefederalist.com/2025/09/25/the-american-left-is-resurrecting-the-bloody-legacy-of-john-brown/

26. Yes, really: https://x.com/TheGeorgiaWhig/status/1970964102509101494

27. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/john-browns-bloody-abolitionist-crusade/

28.

29. Discussed here: