The outbreak of deadly leftist violence is only the latest round of death and destruction that is always simmering beneath the surface of the wretched ideology. It was predictable that, with President Trump running again, it would boil over. And it will likely get worse before it subsides for a season. But it will always be there. 

It’s simply a permanent part of the leftist DNA.

We are in the midst of the current strain. The most recent was the illegal alien leftist who set multiple people on fire during an event in Boulder, Colorado, that was being held to bring attention to getting the hostages returned from Hamas. He was raving about freeing Palestine as he attempted to burn Jews alive. Let’s also note that this came right after the media ran a story about Israelis killing Gazan civilians that turned out to be false.

A few weeks ago, a leftist progressive killed two young Israeli embassy staffers — who were about to be engaged — as they left a celebration at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. In December, a leftist Socialist murdered an insurance company executive in New York City, while last summer, a leftist set the Pennsylvania Governor’s Mansion on fire with the family inside in hopes of killing them all.

And, of course, last year, there were two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump’s life by leftists whipped up into thinking that fascism will reign if he is elected.

What we’ve witnessed in the past year is a permanent state of leftism. This did not start in 2023. It goes way back, at least, to the leftist terrorists of the 1960s.

The late 1960s saw the rise of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This leftist Marxist group became increasingly radicalized over the Vietnam War, and when it fell apart in 1969 over how violent it became, it spawned the violent 70s leftist groups.

During the summer of 1970 alone, there were 20 bombings a week in California, mostly minor, some not, but all by radical leftists from various groups. One of the most well-known groups was the Weather Underground, an outgrowth of the SDS, whose leaders naturally went on to be professors at leftist American universities. 

Beginning in 1971, the Weather Underground bombed the United States Capitol, bombed the Pentagon, and bombed the U.S. State Department, among dozens of other bombings, while also plotting to assassinate a California State Senator, all over seven years. Former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers told the New York Times in 2001 that he did not regret setting off bombs and wished they had done more. Ayers was a “distinguished professor” of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago at the time.

The Weather Underground was a radical, far-left Marxist organization that emerged from the Students for a Democratic Society. Their base tenets were anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism. Sound familiar?

The Symbionese Liberation Army grew up at the same time, and its members were convicted of murder and committed high-profile bank robberies and acts of destruction. They sought to establish a political symbiosis — hence the name — to unify all left-wing struggles, encompassing feminism, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism. Yup, that does sound familiar.

The Black Panther Party was another high-profile, violent leftist organization that particularly enjoyed killing police. One of their leaders, Eldridge Cleaver, led an ambush of police officers in Oakland, California, that resulted in the death of one and injuries for another. They were involved in several shootouts with police that resulted in another death by their founder, Huey Newton. They also tortured and murdered a suspected police informant.

The Black Panthers embraced Marxist principles of socialism and class struggle. They considered themselves the forefront of the proletariat — Karl Marx’s term for the underclass that would rise and destroy the bourgeois middle class.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, leftist violence focused more on the environmental front but with continued Marxist roots. Between 1996 and 2002, the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front committed a combined 600 criminal acts, causing about $42 million in damage and injuring several people, according to the FBI.

Long before the riots of 2020, Antifa was stinking up the place with violent acts destroying property and injuring people, centered mainly around the Portland and Seattle areas. Antifa stands for anti-fascist, though they seem to employ uniformly fascist tactics against democratically elected leaders. Because they are not centrally organized, they champion various forms of communism, anarchism, socialism, and general anti-corporatism. 

A modern, violent leftist group that is getting little attention is an autonomous, pro-abortion leftist network called Jane’s Revenge. It pulls its name from the Jane Collective, an underground organization in Chicago that helped women abort their babies before the disastrous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made it legal. Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for vandalism and attacks on anti-abortion clinics around the United States since May 2022.

Just recently, Unity of Fields tweeted a call to start killing cops and regular American citizens. The group, which has helped organize the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, cheered the murder of the two Israeli Embassy staffers. The Liberation Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America called the killer a “political prisoner.”

And that leads us right up to the current wave of leftist violence. Expect it to get worse. It is inseparable from the ideology.

The Democratic Party writ large, the old corporate media, and academia have been pressing the propaganda for years now that President Trump and the Republican Party are racists and Nazis who are bent on installing a fascist regime in the United States. To accomplish this, they are suppressing the vote of minorities and ignoring the law and processes (all conveniently cherry-picked by the leftists), which makes Trump's MAGA and the GOP an existential threat to democracy.

With this wild-eyed verbiage, even from the very top of the Democratic Party, whipping people into a frenzy of fear and anger and a philosophical DNA riddled with violent intent, we can expect the violence to get worse, perhaps much worse, before it gets better.

Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren, and a rapacious hunger to fight for America on their behalf. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].