On Wednesday morning, a sniper killed an ICE detainee and wounded several others in a shooting at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

Bullets found near the shooter’s body were reportedly engraved with anti-ICE messages.

Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, wrote on X, “While the investigation is ongoing, the initial review of the evidence shows an ideological motive behind this attack. These despicable, politically motivated attacks against law enforcement are not a one-off.”

The number one clue that the shooter had a left-wing perspective is that the shooting happened at an ICE facility. This is not the first act of violence at an ICE facility in recent months. In August, there was an ICE facility that was attacked in Yakima, Washington. In July, there were ten suspects who were charged for their July 4 attack in Texas, in which, according to ICE, nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons attacked a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Prairie Line detention facility in Alvarado, Texas.

There was an attack on ICE officers in Los Angeles that prompted federal intervention by the Trump administration.

This is nothing new, and pretending that it is something new is ridiculous. As acting ICE director Todd Lyons said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my law enforcement career. I’ve never seen threats on law enforcement, specifically ICE, increase the way it is. You know, we’re up over 1,000% assaults on officers right now. And really just a lot of the talk that’s out there, a lot of the rhetoric, is just the violence directed towards law enforcement officers just trying to do their job. And we just keep it seeing an increase step by step.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the shooting was an attempted assassination of ICE officers. It was his belief that the ICE detainees were hit accidentally, that the sniper was not trying to hit the detainees, but was trying to fire at law enforcement.

Meanwhile, NPR host Maria Hinojosa compared ICE to the Nazis, saying, “Black and Latino unity and the city of Chicago will only grow thanks to Donald Trump and his Republican Party. So that is something that he and his Republican Party has feared, that unity of black and brown people coming together. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and we do not like outsiders coming to tell us how to run our city. … I posted, actually, right after that first day on the ground in Chicago; I posted about the fact that there are little Anne Franks, right? … little girls and boys who are afraid to come out of their homes.”

This sort of rhetoric could very likely lead to violence, because when you say that Anne Frank is hiding, that makes ICE the Nazis.

Last week, Rep. Jasmine Crockett compared ICE to slave patrols.

When you keep saying that ICE agents are Nazis, that ICE agents are slave patrols, people might get the idea that maybe you should do violence to members of ICE. That’s not a huge leap.

I’m not saying Jasmine Crockett is responsible for somebody shooting an ICE agent, any more than I’m saying that Barack Obama’s anti-police rhetoric led to the shooting of Dallas police officers.

But — if you keep ratcheting up the temperature, if you keep treating people in law enforcement as though they are enemies of the people, as though they are doing the bidding of dark Nazi gods or something of that ilk, people at the fringes are going to do acts of violence.

The night before the shooting happened, Gavin Newsom was on Stephen Colbert’s terrible show, which is still on the air like a zombie, walking beyond its own brain death.

Gavin Newsom proceeded to suggest that people need to push back on ICE agents, saying:

That’s happening in the United States of America. Masked men jumping out of unmarked cars. People disappearing. No due process, no oversight. Zero accountability happening in the United States of America today. People ask, “Well, is it authoritarianism? You’re being hyperbolic.’”

Bulls*** we’re being hyperbolic. If you’re a black and brown community, it’s here in this country. I’m deeply proud that I had the privilege of signing the nation’s first bill, to address the issue of masking, also to require you have simple identification. … I mean, if some guy jumped out of an unmarked car in a van with a mask on, tried to grab me, I mean, by definition, you’re going to push back. And so these are not just authoritarian tendencies. These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government.

If you keep saying these sorts of things over and over and over again, it should not be a gigantic shock when people commit acts of violence.

The Left has increasingly been committing acts of violence because the rhetoric is so unhinged. 

One of the major problems in the country right now, as polling data shows, is that Americans believe that their neighbors are their enemies. Much of that is self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. If your neighbor says you are their enemy and then you respond, “If he thinks I’m his enemy, then he’s my enemy,” you end up with a cycle of partisan polarization that is unbridgeable. 

Once it becomes unbridgeable, you are effectuating higher levels of hatred and violence. That is a real scenario in the United States.

It’s not equally positioned. For my entire lifetime, the political Left in this country has basically treated the Right as though the Right were some form of Nazi offshoot.

If you look at the polling data, you will see that things didn’t shift for Republicans starting to react to that attitude until roughly 2013-14. Thus, for a solid decade and a half, from the time George W. Bush became president, there was a move by the Left to demonize Republicans as the “Other,” as though there was something wrong with them. Democrats didn’t just think that their neighbors were wrong; they thought they were morally bad, while Republicans tended to think that their neighbors were wrong, but not morally bad.

All of that started to shift around the second term of Barack Obama.

Now both sides think the other side is morally bad, and it’s pushing both parties out to fringe rhetoric — but the Left has been there for a long time. It’s systemically integrated into their worldviews.

This is why I’ve been talking about the permission structures for violence that are generating violence, generating things like the assassination of my friend Charlie Kirk.

When you’re creating permission structures, when you create a mental model whereby speech is violence, that people who oppose you are actually actors of deep, malicious evil who must be destroyed at any cost, you’re going to get higher levels of violence, which will generate a reaction on the other side.

And that could tear this country, the greatest nation ever created, apart.