Will Leftist Terrorism Become Commonplace?

2,990 words

On September 10, 2025, conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University. The assassin was 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a Utah native who was raised by a conservative Mormon family, but who had been radicalized to the far-left in the preceding years. Robinson was in a homosexual relationship with a roommate who identified as transgender and was in the process of “gender transition”. Thus far, it appears that Robinson’s primary motive was to “protect” his lover from Kirk’s rejection of the validity of transgenderism, going so far as to write anti-fascist slogans on the shell casings and allegedly stating “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is the most significant in a series of similar attacks which have taken place in the United States in recent years. Two weeks after Kirk’s murder, on September 24, 2025, a shooter fired several shots at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Dallas, Texas. Ironically, he ended up killing three detainees, though his target was deemed to have been agents. A few weeks prior on August 23, 2025, a 23-year-old who had at one point identified as transgender shot up a Catholic church, killing two children.

During the 2024 US Presidential Campaign, there were two assassination attempts against President Donald Trump. One occurred on July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally near Butler Pennsylvania, which resulted in the death of one of the rally’s attendees. The other happened at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida on September 15, 2024. On March 27, 2023, a transgender individual shot up a Presbyterian Church school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing six. On November 21, 2021, a black man named Darell Brooks, motivated by anti-white animus, drove a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, resulting in six deaths.

Liberals and leftists have dismissed concern over these recent far-left inspired terror attacks, arguing that far-right terrorism is a greater threat. This often depends on what one considers to be terrorism or not, but until the last couple of years, there was some truth to this statement. To avoid the accusation of biased cherry-picking, it should be noted that past decade or so has seen many significant instances of far-right motivated terrorism as well, often in opposition to mass immigration, demographic shifts, or Islamization.

These have included the 2015 Charlseton Church shooting, the 2017 Quebec City Mosque shooting, the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, the 2019 Christchurch shooting and New Zealand Mosque shooting, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, and the 2022 Buffalo shooting. This time period has also seen several instances of incel terrorism including the 2014 Isla Vista Shooting, the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting, and the 2018 Toronto attack. While the Elliot Roger, Chris Harper-Mercer, and Alek Minassian, the perpetrators of these incel-inspired attacks were of mixed ancestry, and their motives were social rejection, these attacks have been interpreted as far-right by some.

The other major driver of terrorism in the West has been Islam. In Europe, Islamic extremism has been the motive for most major terror attacks in the past few years. These have included the 2015 attacks in Paris, the 2016 Brussels bombings, the 2016 Nice attack, the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and the 2024 Moscow Crocus City Hall attack. The United States has also seen a number of Islamic terrorist attacks such as the 2013 Boston bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, the 2015 Chattanooga shootings, the 2016 Orlando shooting, the 2017 New York truck attack, and the 2025 New Orleans truck attack.

Liberals and leftists also make the claim that far-right terrorism is a bigger threat in the United States than Islamic terrorism. This is somewhat misleading seeing as the statistics for the collective death tolls they use always exclude 9/11 (I’m not going to entertain conspiracy theories here), but include the Oklahoma City Bombing, skewing the statistics to make right-wing terrorism appear more deadly. If we consider only post-9/11 attacks, from what I can gather, Islamic terrorism has claimed slightly more victims than right-wing terrorism during that period in the US. However, Muslims make up a much smaller portion of the US population than those with right-wing political beliefs, meaning proportionally, Islamic terrorism remains far more deadly per capita than right-wing terrorism in America.

This essay isn’t intended as a comprehensive study into the statistics of terrorism, and the examples I have listed are far from exhaustive. But looking at what info is available as objectively as possible, if we are to ignore Islamic terrorism and simply compare far-left verses far-right terrorism within the past decade or so, the claim that far-right terrorism has killed more people than far-left terrorism does appear accurate. However, what we see is that these major incidences of far-left violence are more recent. I’m going to put forth a theory as to why and speculate on if this might be a sign of things to come in the near future.

Looking back at the history of far-left terrorism (that being random attacks, not state-backed persecution), two eras come to mind. The first is late 19th and early 20th century in Europe and North America when Old Left anarchists regularly carried out bombings or assassinations of important political figures. These were attacks against the old order in the West which existed prior to the First World War. The energy behind such attacks manifested itself politically in the form of the various socialist movements which emerged following the Russian Revolution.

The second era is the late 1960s and early 1970s, when New Left groups such as the Weather Underground committed numerous bombings in the United States, primarily targeting government buildings. These attacks died down once the New Left completed the long march through the institutions with former far-left militants becoming influential academics and political activists. Both of these waves of political violence took place when the left was not hegemonic but attempting to make inroads into power.

While they had been on the ascendancy since the 1960s, the ideas of the New Left reached their apex in the 2010s and early 2020s in the era which is now referred to as the Great Awokening. This is when left-wing rhetoric related to issues such as race, immigration, feminism, and LGBT became significantly more extreme in the media and academy, and when Western governments began implementing increasingly radical progressive social policy. The phenomenon of “cancel culture” had already existed for decades at this point, but it became much more prevalent during these years. This manufactured conformity to progressive politics by creating an ever-present fear of ostracization throughout public life in the West.

Despite the increased aggression from the left during this period, these years didn’t see very many large incidences of far-left terrorism. The only major leftist terror attacks which come to mind during this period were the 2016 Dallas police shooting and the 2017 congressional baseball shooting. Leftist violence was primarily limited to ANTIFA’s scuffles in the streets. The left’s extreme rhetoric, but relative lack of outright violence in these years may seem counter-intuitive, but it makes sense when considering the impetus behind terrorism.

The goal of terrorism is to instill fear in one’s political opponents. However, when one has the absolute backing of every powerful institution, there’s a much easier way to achieve that goal. If a hit piece in the MSM, a coordinated smear campaign on social media, or a call to an employer is all one needs to do to get their political opponents deplatformed, fired from their jobs, and cast out of polite society, there’s no need to resort to political violence. The goal of instilling fear has already been achieved.

During the Great Awokening, far-right violence was more prevalent (though not to the extent liberals and leftists will have you believe) with the aforementioned examples occurring then. The common denominator between all the far-right terror attacks during this period was online right-wing echo chambers. This era from about 2014 to 2022 saw almost the entire mainstream media in lockstep behind these left-wing causes and mass censorship of right-wing figureheads and talking points across the major social media platforms. This had the effect of siphoning off right-wing discourse onto smaller platforms such as 4chan, Gab, Telegram, or Stormfront. Echo chambers result in the most extreme form of any given ideology taking over the insular space as any amount of nuance is met with bitter repudiation.

I’ll be the first to warn of the danger posed by the demographic trajectory of Western countries, but I believe the problem can be solved in a relatively peaceful manner and that random acts of violence are counterproductive. While I consider the concern legitimate, the problem with far-right echo chambers is that they vastly overstate how terrible the situation actually is. This demoralization gives way to a destructive nihilistic attitude, leading adherents to embrace the delusion that “accelerationism” towards some kind of cataclysm like societal collapse or civil war is the only solution. Most of the prominent far-right terrorist attacks that took place during the 2010s or early 2020s were spurred on by this distorted understanding of the situation.

Since around 2022, there has been a significant shift in the political climate in Western countries in contrast to the years of the Great Awokening. This can be attributed to several factors. One is the burnout with the vitriolic, hyper-moralistic cultural climate created by woke politics, which reached its crescendo in 2020 and 2021 with both the COVID pandemic and

In addition, the early 2020s have seen a significant decline in standard of living in Western countries which radical progressive social policies have not only not prevented but actively made worse. Another major change was the easing of social media censorship with Musk’s purchase of Twitter and other platforms in turn reducing (though not fully eliminating) restrictions on political speech.

The past three years have seen right-wing viewpoints become more prevalent in the broader political discourse. Concerns over issues such as mass immigration, anti-whiteism, feminism, or LGBT normalization are now being discussed at a higher level in Western countries. Some major corporations have either scaled down or eliminated their DEI programs as a result of the employee incompetence or public backlash they have resulted in. Mainstream entertainment and advertising have clawed back on the overbearing woke messaging in the media they produce in response to negative reception.

Right-leaning political parties such as the GOP under Donald Trump, Reform in the UK, or AfD in Germany have seen an increase in popularity in response to the trends of the preceding decade. Some left-leaning parties have now toned down their radical progressive messaging as a result of this shift. The far-left is also undergoing a change with the rainbow coalition and its brand of wokeism gradually being replaced with various non-white ethnic lobbies in the form of Third Worldism. This does not mean that the progressive left has been defeated by any stretch, but they no longer have the lockdown on the political and cultural consensus they had for about a decade.

One element which of leftism observable both historically and in the present day is a sadism driven by either resentment or a desire for self-righteous moral gratification. Looking as far back as the French Revolution, this can be seen among the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror. This was also observable among anarchist terrorists of the Old Left during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When these maladjusted discontents rose to power through political movements such as Bolshevism, their modus switched from random violence to state-backed terror. These were the types of people who joined organizations like the Cheka as a means of acting upon their malice. This shift also occurred with the New Left. Once they gained institutional power, the bombings of the 60s and 70s stopped and “cancel culture” began. Unlike the Old Left which used hard power, the New Left has used soft power, but the motive has been the same.

This explains the behaviour of leftists and liberals during the COVID pandemic. COVID granted people unprecedented licence to harass and bully their fellow citizens with the backing of power, something those with such twisted desires took full advantage of. Such urges have also been a driving force behind the rise of the transgender phenomenon. Along with the perverse sexual gratification it provides certain individuals, forcing others to recognize them as the opposite gender under threat of punishment by powerful institutions also plays into the sadistic fantasies of resentful sociopaths.

The primary threat of far-left groups like Antifa posed during the Great Awokening era was doxing. This wasn’t a threat of violence, but loss of employment and ostracization. While they did engage in street violence as well, the real danger right-wingers faced from this wasn’t injury or death, but legal consequences as a result of defending themselves from assaults by Antifa thugs. These tactics only worked for the far left because they had employers and law enforcement on their side.

The murder of Charlie Kirk and the celebratory reaction of many on the left has been the biggest blow to the moral standing of the antifascist left in decades. This has brought organizations like Antifa or the ADL under public scrutiny like never before and gotten a great deal of centrist or centre-left individuals to disassociate themselves from the extreme. It has also resulted in a number of left-wing individuals being “cancelled” after celebrating Kirk’s murder, something which almost exclusively happened to right-wing individuals espousing not nearly as extreme views in the prior decade. This loss of moral stature will reduce the ability of antifascist leftists to harass and persecute their political opponents with the support of powerful institutions, which may result in some of them resorting to violence instead.

The phenomenon of right-wing online echo chambers and the role it played in far-right terrorist attacks in previous years now appears to be developing on the left too. While the mainstream remains progressive, it is more moderately so, and the discourse now involves right-wing views to a greater extent. Unlike far-right echo chambers which formed as a result of deplatforming, this opening up of public discourse has gotten many leftists to deliberately isolate themselves in far-left echo chambers like Bluesky, Twitch, Discord, and Reddit.

A study into attitude networks and political polarization in the United States found that political views among right-wing individuals are far more divergent that among left-wing individuals. This illustrates a demand for ideological orthodoxy on the left and may explain why they would voluntarily exile themselves onto platforms where they can enforce such conformity. What one can find on sites such as Bluesky is leftists attacking one another for not being radical enough (such as believing Kirk’s murder unjustified), leading to the most extreme forms of their worldview dominating the insular platform. This, combined with the overall mental instability of leftists as some research has shown, creates a fertile breading ground for the radicalization which would drive one to commit an act of political violence.

A counterpoint to the prediction that leftist terrorism may become more common is that, while the left is extremely radical, doctrinaire, and mentally unstable, it is also very feminine. Most terrorist attacks (be they far-right, far-left, incel, or Islamic) are committed by young men in their late teens or early 20s, a demographic which the left is quickly losing. While a hysterical 40-year-old millennial cat lady may in Portland have all the radicalism and mental instability in the world, its unlikely she is going to have the necessary aggression to detonate a bomb at a Christian school or ICE facility any time soon.

However, there is one subset of the left which seems poised to carry out such acts in the coming years. That is transgender individuals, specifically males who desire to “transition” to becoming females. Transgender mania was a product of a relentless worldwide propaganda campaign as documented by Scott Howard in his book The Transgender Industrial Complex. This was part of the Great Awokening, kicking off around 2015 with this issue being forcibly shoved into every aspect of modern life. There is now a widespread burnout with this agenda, causing the fad to lose the cultural prestige it had a few short years ago.

Eric Kaufmann recently reported that the number of young people identifying as transgender has declined over the past two years, suggesting this social craze has started to go out of fashion. Unfortunately, unlike other fads such as being a goth or a hippie, transgenderism can’t be abandoned with a simple haircut or a change of clothes. Many of those who were suckered in by this deranged social engineering have undergone irreversible body altering medical procedures for it. Furthermore, most of them were in their teens or twenties when they did so, meaning they threw their lives away for a passing trend at such a young age.

These were already severely mentally unstable individuals. They then quite literally gave their bodies for artificially elevated power and social status, allowing them to enact their revenge against normal well-adjusted people. Now that that licence is diminishing, they are left with the prospect of spending the rest of their lives as deformed relics of the late 2010s and early 2020s, having lost the increased social stature they briefly enjoyed. And despite what they’d have you believe, these “transwomen” really are young men in biological reality. Someone like that getting their hands on a gun is a recipe for disaster.

There’s a chance that the coming years may see an increase in leftist political violence. However, if this does happen, it would indicate a decline in the political and cultural power of the rainbow coalition, not its ascension. This is not to imply that the threat facing Western countries has been defeated, but the radical progressivism of the past decade has run out of momentum, and the adherents of this suicide cult have nowhere else to go. Will the death throes of the last true believers of the Great Awokening be sporadic outbursts of political violence? It wouldn’t come as a surprise.