By Noah Rothman
Thursday, July 09, 2026
If the Washington Post’s news reporters were
capable of shame, they probably would not be sticking with their description of
a small-cell left-wing terrorist attack on federal law enforcement last year as
a “protest” that went sideways.
The Post got plenty
of grief last month when it described a July 4, 2025, attack on an
Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Texas — one of three armed
assaults on ICE and CBP facilities that year — as a “protest” that “turned
violent.” That characterization was indefensibly misleading. As I wrote of that attack last month:
On July 4, federal agents were
compelled to rush into the parking lot outside the ICE facility when ten people
in “black, military-style clothing began shooting fireworks at the facility.”
As the agents investigated the scene, their attackers opened up on them with
firearms using overlapping fields of fire. One officer was shot in the neck as
dozens of rounds were fired in their direction.
Once again, the attackers left no
ambiguity about their motives. ICE agents said that, in the attack’s aftermath,
they found vehicles graffitied with phrases like “ICE pig” and “traitor.” In
addition, their assailants left propagandistic literature behind them,
including fliers that read “Fight ICE Terror with Class War” and “Free All
Political Prisoners,” and a flag that read “Resist Fascism. Fight Oligarchy.”
The agenda that has led the Post’s reporters to
stick with downplaying the threat posed by left-wing political violence in America isn’t hard
to discern.
The paper’s latest offense against journalistic integrity
was a brief aside in an article designed to cast the Trump administration as a
bunch of obsessive cranks for attempting to raise awareness around the
“resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”
The paper and its sources are justified in expressing the
concern that this initiative could be used by unscrupulous actors in this
administration, and future presidencies, to criminalize domestic political
activities. Slippery slope arguments have their place. But the article goes to
great lengths to imply that the threat the Trump administration is focused on
doesn’t exist.
The insouciant Europeans with whom the Post’s
reporters spoke said as much outright. “Our law enforcement authorities have
not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a
high-priority threat in our country,” declared one impossibly effete Eurocrat.
In April, the New York Times attempted
a similar act of evasion by implication. (It cannot say outright that far-left
political violence is a negligible phenomenon, because that would be an
outright lie.) But the Times downplayed that observable and growing threat too in the effort to convince
its readers that the Trump administration’s true targets are his “domestic
political opponents.”
I’d be more inclined to take that concern seriously if
those articulating it could define, or even recognize, left-wing political
violence. The Washington Post certainly can’t. Its reporters admitted as
much:
Analysts say it can be difficult
to categorize left-wing violence. (Is the killing of a health care executive
over perceived corporate greed — as the suspect Luigi Mangione is alleged to
have done — a “left wing” act?) And though there is some upswing of political
violence in the United States, “to date left-wing violent extremism has
typically been less lethal than other forms of terrorism,” said Bruce Hoffman,
senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Left-wing political violence is not hard to categorize.
Much of it falls into the category of anarchistic violent extremism (AVE)
within the FBI’s universe of domestic violent extremists (DVEs). Luigi
Mangione’s anti-capitalist violence is not inscrutable — not to those who
oppose his actions or to the ghouls who revel in his act of human sacrifice. Left-wing
political violence does tend to produce fewer bodies, as Hoffman notes, but not
because it is a less pervasive threat; merely because its targets are often,
but by no means exclusively, property or armed officers of the law.
This is the sort of thing that readers of my latest book,
Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in
America, would already know. But that’s why you’re never going to read
a review of that book in a mainstream outlet like the Times or the Post.
They will not grapple with its findings and conclusions or the 80 pages of
notes that support both. They prefer the myth that left-wing violence is a fabrication of febrile
Republican imaginations, and they hope you do too.
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