UC Santa Barbara Professor Tells Socialist Crowd Exactly What Kind of War Is Coming

Someone assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a college campus almost exactly one year ago.

Now a tenured University of California professor wants socialists to arm up next.

They told a packed Chicago ballroom exactly what kind of war is coming.

A Tenured Professor Calls for Democrats to Be Destroyed

Butch Ware teaches African and Islamic history at UC Santa Barbara, a public university funded by California taxpayers.

Over Labor Day weekend he took the stage at Socialism 2026, a four-day Marxist gathering held at a Chicago Hyatt.

The agenda promised sessions on abolition and anti-ICE organizing, the same language DSA chapters use when they mean dismantling law enforcement entirely.

"The Democrats cannot be reasoned with," Ware told the crowd. "They must be destroyed."

He did not stop at rhetoric.

"You cannot call yourself a revolutionary and not be talking about training with weapons," Ware said.

Then he turned to the crowd itself and said they were not ready either.

"Y'all ain't nowhere near ready for a war in the streets," he said. "You better get ready for both kinds of war."

Ware used the same speech to trash elected socialists like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed as too tame for the movement he wants.

"We have a tremendous opportunity," Ware told the room, urging his allies to move before Democratic leadership can rein them in.

The Same Crowd That Chanted Burn It Down Cheered Him On

This is not new for the far left.

Antifa mobs surrounded the Supreme Court in 2022 after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

"If we don't get it, burn it down," they chanted, according to Fox News.

They spray-painted "bans off our bodies" on the street outside the building.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley says Chicago is the latest chapter in the rage politics he chronicles in his book Rage and the Republic, and he says establishment Democrats keep pretending they can control it.

Turley points to survey data showing this is not a fringe problem anymore.

A Georgetown Baker Center poll found roughly ten percent of Americans now say political violence is sometimes justified, and five percent say individual attacks are often justified.

A University of Virginia Center for Politics survey found 41 percent of Biden voters believe violence is justified to stop Republicans from achieving their goals.

Only 69 percent of Americans still say democracy beats every other form of government.

Ware did not whisper this in private.

He said it into a microphone, to a room that cheered.

Turley has already been tracking where this leads.

Months before Chicago, he wrote that today's radicals are the New Jacobins, chanting for revolution the way the French mob once did before the guillotines came out.

Students at George Washington University have chanted "Guillotine!" during campus protests.

Others online celebrated Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of a health insurance executive, as some kind of folk hero.

Turley's warning is simple: the radicals cheering Ware today will be the first people the revolution turns on tomorrow.

Your Tax Dollars Still Pay His Salary

UC Santa Barbara has not fired Butch Ware.

As of this writing, the school has not issued one public statement about a tenured employee telling a crowd to train with weapons for "war in the streets."

That silence is the real story here.

California taxpayers write the check that pays Ware's salary every month, and university administrators keep handing tenure to professors who talk like revolutionaries and then act stunned when the streets catch fire.

Neither Chicago DSA nor the national Democratic Socialists of America has disowned him, even while Mamdani's own team tries to sell socialism to New York as rent freezes and free buses.

Ware just told the movement's most committed members which version is the real one, and it is not Mamdani's.

Chicago just gave him another exhibit.

The midterms are two months out, and Ware just handed every Republican strategist in the country a recording of a tenured professor promising "both kinds of war."

The next riot will not start on its own.

Sources:

• Jonathan Turley, "You Better Get Ready for … War: Socialists Call for 'War in the Streets' and the End of Capitalism," JonathanTurley.org, September 8, 2026.
• David Manney, "When Socialists Start Talking About 'War in the Streets,' Believe Your Ears," PJ Media, September 8, 2026.
• Craig Bannister, "Professor Tells Socialist Conference That Democrats 'Must Be Destroyed,'" NewsBusters, September 8, 2026.
• Jonathan Turley, "A Nation Divided: New Survey Shows Changing Views of Democracy and Political Violence," JonathanTurley.org, April 28, 2026.
• Fox News, "Antifa Chant 'Burn It Down' at Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Protest in DC," Fox News, June 24, 2022.
• Jonathan Turley, "New Jacobins Threaten Constitution as Political Violence Rises in America," Fox News, February 3, 2026.