Where Are the Dot Connectors?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 02, 2025

 

You never have to wait long before an act of right-wing political terrorism or even vandalism stirs a cottage industry devoted to “connecting the dots.” Whether the connections are valid or spurious, sleuths emerge from the woodwork to eagerly draw crisscrossing threads across the paranoiac’s corkboard, linking the violence to the figures they imagine might benefit from violence. White supremacy and white nationalism, limited-government conservatism, support for the right to life, or even just taking a special interest in your child’s education — these are ideals with the capacity to radicalize. Only the keenest of observers with the requisite educational background and insight can see it.

 

Given this reliable tic, the degree to which the professional dot-connectors have abdicated their role in the last several weeks is quite conspicuous.

 

The FBI is treating the deployment of Molotov cocktails against a variety of elderly and middle-aged supporters of Israel, one of them reportedly a Holocaust refugee, as a “targeted terror attack.” As they should. The attacker came armed not just with firebombs but with the shibboleths that so often accompany pro-Palestinian violence.

 

It’s the third act of terroristic violence in service to this cause in as many months. The arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home by an anti-Israel activist in April and the gunning down of two young people outside an Israeli embassy event in Washington, D.C., in May establish the trend. But the trendsetters are rarely treated to the tortured effort to establish nefarious associations that so often follows acts of right-wing violence.

 

It’s not like that exercise would be difficult. It wouldn’t take much enterprise to establish a through-line between the murderous violence targeting Jews and their supporters to the antisocial behavior that has typified this movement for decades — a condition that the 10/7 massacre only kicked into overdrive. Intrepid researchers might see the unheeded warning signs in the glorification of terrorism apparent among the college students who brandish Hamas and Hezbollah flags and headbands. They might identify ominous portents in the demonstrators’ efforts to block highways, bridges, and airport tarmacs — activities designed to endanger their neighbors.

 

The violent pro-Palestinian attack on the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters from which lawmakers were forced to flee in terror might have been treated as a sign of things to come. The menacing rhetoric accompanying this sort of activism should also have been a wake-up call. “There is only one solution: Intifada. Revolution.” “Death to America.” “Globalize the intifada.” “By any means necessary.” The network of activists who chant these and other slogans could not be more explicit about the actions they prescribe. “The slave who murders the slave master, who torches the master’s house and perhaps kills the ‘civilian’ slavers’ family and servants is wholly justified in their act,” the Australian far-left website Solidarity observes. “We do not condemn the Indigenous resistance against the violence of colonization.” That sort of candor is hardly uncommon on the fringes of society from which violent activists are drawn.

 

It may be that far-left activists who valorize the zeal inherent in acts of political terrorism are drawn to the Palestinian cause because it is so inextricably coupled with violence. It may be that the vestigial elements of doctrinal bolshevism that fester in America’s darker political corners animate our tormentors. The chicken and the egg notwithstanding, there is an undeniable link between Palestinian nationalism, the far-left “omnicause,” and acts of violence. You don’t need a map and compass to establish the relationship. So, why is it that the cadre of dot-connectors who can be counted on to spring to action at the first sign of right-wing terror are silent?

 

According to our most influential institutions — law enforcement, academia, the press, etc. — the threat of right-wing violence is forever looming over America. And yet it’s the menace of left-wing violence that so regularly descends on it. If those institutions were interested in combating it, they’d start by calling it by its name.