Yesterday’s shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas, which left one victim as well as the perpetrator dead, comes just weeks after the assassination of activist Charlie Kirk thanks to a sniper’s bullet. Just as the alleged Kirk shooter inscribed his bullets with political and video-game references, the shell casings used in the Dallas attack bore “anti-ICE” slogans. Together, these incidents have reignited fears that America is sliding back into an era of rampant political violence.

For some, the 2020s feel like the Seventies all over again, minus the bell-bottoms and hula hoops. That earlier decade was a long hangover after the failed revolution of the Sixties. Political violence became part of the landscape, the shadow side of a nation already battered by Vietnam, stagflation, and Watergate: assassination attempts on national leaders, urban bombings, and hostage-taking. Radical outfits such as the Weather Underground staged jailbreaks and detonated bombs as they imagined themselves at the vanguard of a global uprising.

And yet the shoe doesn’t quite fit. Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, there has been little evidence of organised Left-wing terrorism with strategic goals, only scattered episodes of lone-wolf violence. Murder suspects Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson, as well as both of Trump’s would-be assassins, Ryan Routh and Thomas Crooks, all acted alone. From all appearances, Joshua Jahn, the Dallas ICE shooter, was also an isolated figure. These were violent gestures, not sustained campaigns.

Of course, the lone gunman is nothing new. President Gerald Ford was shot at twice in the span of 17 days, once by a woman who claimed she was trying to spark a revolution. Alabama Governor George Wallace was left paralysed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in 1972. But the radicals of the late Sixties and Seventies, however misguided, were still embedded in movements that aspired to mass politics. Their violence was part of a broader attempt to provoke a crisis and build revolutionary counter-power.

In 1974, for example, the “Days of Rage”-era Weather Underground published Prairie Fire, calling for armed struggle “in open as well as quiet ways”, before bombing the US State Department the following January. In September 1970, four aircraft bound for New York and one for London were hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who took more than 300 hostages. Those acts were coordinated, strategic, and tied to wider political movements.

By contrast, the closest thing to a coordinated confrontation that has happened in recent years was the 2023 “Block Cop City” campaign, where activists clashed with police over a planned training complex in Atlanta. Even there, the Leftists’ tactics were laughably non-violent: masked Antifa types marching into a line of armoured officers armed not with rifles but banners, puppets, and houseplants.

The violence of the 2020s is troubling, but the greater danger lies in the state’s overreaction. The Trump administration has seized on these events to paint all Left-wing dissent as an existential threat to America. Within days of Kirk’s assassination, officials promised a sweeping “crackdown on the radical Left”, named major foundations as culprits, and floated revoking nonprofit status, visas, and tax privileges. Trump went further, signing an executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organisation, despite the fact that it is scarcely an organisation at all.

Collapsing the distinction between violent actors and non-violent dissent is a chilling escalation of a war on free speech and association. The echoes of McCarthyism are unmistakable. Then, inflated fears of communist infiltration justified loyalty oaths and blacklists. Today, isolated lone-wolf attacks are invoked to justify surveillance, censorship, and suppression.

The irony is that, despite Elon Musk’s claim on X that “the Left is the party of murder,” the American Left is too weak and fragmented to resemble the bomb-throwing radicals of the Seventies. There’s little revolutionary fervour, just a climate of disaggregated rage, and a government eager to exploit it.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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