By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
It’s hard to overstate the degree to which progressive
activists are talking themselves into an apocalyptic reading of the current
political landscape.
To give you an idea of the prevailing mood on the far
left, here’s a sampling of the discourse around Donald Trump’s immigration
enforcement initiatives via the left-wing blog Common Dreams:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been
transformed into the president’s personal “fascist
paramilitary squad.” That illegitimate “terror” apparatus advances an
“inhuman agenda” in which “undesirable elements” are deemed the “radical left”
and “weeded out.”
Individual ICE agents cannot be rehabilitated because “you
can’t train away ICE’s terror.” Its activities underscore the “urgent and
necessary need to delegitimize and dismantle the agencies of state terror.”
Only “dismantling these systems” will deliver America from its torment.
Republicans may be the executors of this campaign of
political violence, according to the activist left. But the accommodationist
Democrats who lack the gumption to ratify the activist left’s eschatological
delusions are an equally urgent threat.
If Democrats don’t shut down the government again to
prevent the continued funding of America’s immigration enforcement agencies,
they will have succumbed to “complicity
and cowardice.” Democratic lawmakers who fail to acknowledge the “sick and
un-American” turn that Trump’s deportation initiative has taken should expect a
primary challenge.
In fact, “Ending GOP authoritarianism will require overcoming the
Democratic leadership.” There is a hunger abroad in the left for a
fratricidal reckoning — a purifying crusade to cull from Democratic ranks the
insufficiently emotive and irritatingly prudent. The Democratic Party’s leaders
are “relics” have “alienated much of the party’s base” by failing to distance
themselves “from corporate power, rich elites, and militarism.”
If it sounds like anyone in the Democratic firmament who
responded to the party’s losses in 2024 by attempting to make accommodations
with their new, Trump-dominated political reality is headed for the chopping
block, it should. The activist left is spoiling for an internecine fight. The
first target of their intimidation campaign appears to be California Governor
Gavin Newsom.
The podcast Newsom launched to support his own
presidential ambitions — each episode, a cordial if sometimes fractious gabfest
often with prominent figures drawn from the American right — has become a
source of irritation among left-wingers who resent the right’s access to any
platform, much less one ostensibly controlled by a political ally. Newsom
crossed a line when “he
softened his criticism of ICE” in his recent chat with conservative
broadcaster and Daily Wire proprietor Ben Shapiro.
What exactly was Newsom’s offense? He wavered when
Shapiro pressed him to defend a statement produced by the governor’s
increasingly provocative press office, which accused ICE of meting out
“state-sponsored terrorism.”
Ice officers are “obviously not terrorists,” Shapiro
observed. “Yeah,” Newsom replied. “I think that’s fair.”
This modest gesture of deference to the general
electorate’s distaste for maximalist rhetorical agitation set
progressives’ hair alight.
“This is pathetic but unsurprising from Gavin,” wrote Breaking
Points host Krystal Ball. “ICE’s deployments are the definition of
state-sponsored terrorism. They are literally intended to terrorize communities
Trump wants to punish.”
Newsom’s strategy for winning the Democratic presidential
nomination seems to consist of allowing “rightwing guests to walk all over
him,” former MSNOW host Mehdi
Hasan observed scornfully.
“Gavin Newsom is a slimey [sic] liar who will
contradict himself completely depending on who he is talking to,” observed
Canadian writer and Feminist Current founder Meghan
Murphy. “I can’t believe people vote for this reptilian creep.”
Of course, the scribes at Common Dreams were
similarly incensed. Newsom’s concession is “far out of touch with the
Democratic base and with a widening segment of the country,” one wrote. Citing
the host of the “left-wing talk show One Hand Politics,” a figure who
goes only by “Mason,” Common Dreams summarized its own preferred
approach to engaging with the American right: “grow a f***ing spine and stop
chasing Republican moderates that don’t exist. They all hate you.”
As one left-wing agitator told a group of reporters
following his participation in the storming of a Minneapolis church over the
weekend insisted, “Kill me. Go ahead, kill me. “Because, you know
what, as [Black Panther leader] Fred Hampton said, ‘You can kill the
revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution!”
These violent fantasies today express themselves in the
purgative politics of exclusion and enforced ideological homogeneity. That will
not be the only expression they will take.
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