On a Knife’s Edge

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 29, 2026

 

Perhaps understandably, the national press is wholly devoted to covering the federal government’s de-escalatory walk-back of its deportation campaign and the largely peaceful protests in Minneapolis that contributed to that initiative. Only if you’re looking for it, or an avid consumer of local media, would you encounter the in fact riotous violence that has accompanied those protests.

 

Twenty-six people engaged in “unlawful assembly” and “riotous conduct” were taken into custody this week as they laid siege to a hotel where demonstrators believed ICE agents were holed up. The arrestees, some of whom were opportunists with previous criminal convictions, caused property damage and threw objects at police officers. That fits a pattern that typically follows the sequence of events in Minnesota this week. But that reaction is not limited to Minnesota.

 

Another 40 people were arrested under similar circumstances this week in Manhattan. There, a Jacobin mob broke into a Sixth Avenue Hilton after an anonymous social media account claimed that the hotel was housing federal immigration agents. “Protesters can be heard chanting, ‘No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA,’” Fox News reported. “In a separate video, protesters chant, ‘Kristi Noem will hang.’”

 

In Texas, where there were no fewer than three small-cell terrorist and lone-gunman attacks on ICE and CBP facilities last year, public safety officers in riot gear were deployed to disperse an agitated crowd. The assembled set out to disrupt operations at the facility housing a five-year-old detainee and his father after Democratic politicians, activists, and the press erroneously claimed that federal law enforcement used the child as “bait.”

 

These aren’t headline stories. Many will miss them. But those who won’t are also likely to be those on the right who are as convinced as their political opponents that the most powerful institutions in America are out to get them. As such, the American right, too, is increasingly agitated.

 

In New York, a man threw a deer head at anti-Trump protesters. In Utah, progressive Congressman Maxwell Frost was punched in the face by a man he said had “drunkenly” peppered him with “racist remarks.” The man who attacked Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with what we now know was apple cider vinegar (assault is assault, regardless of the instrument used) appears to have been a fan of the president’s.

 

Amid all this, the antisemitic violence this country has experienced with disturbing regularity since at least October 7, 2023, continues apace. New York City police are treating the attack in which a driver repeatedly rammed his car into the side of the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn on Wednesday as a hate crime. That attack comes on the heels of the assault on a Queens rabbi by an assailant who reportedly yelled “f*** the Jews” as he beat his target about the head and chest.

 

Were it not for the unusual cold snap gripping much of the country, we would likely be experiencing a much larger outbreak of political violence and civil unrest. The atmosphere is that charged. And because political violence is a universally radicalizing phenomenon, one act by one side often catalyzes a reciprocal response from the other. We will see more violence before it’s all through.