What does months of calling ICE agents ‘fascists’ and ‘jackbooted thugs’ lead to?

When news broke of the shooting at the Dallas ICE facility Wednesday morning, the shooter’s motive was not initially clear. The shooter killed two detainees and critically injured a third, according to officials, while no law enforcement agents were injured. It was conceivable that the perpetrator was some nut who hated illegal immigrants and wanted to harm them, although one could reasonably ask why somebody who hated illegal immigrants would shoot people who were in the process of being removed from the country.

But the authorities declared late this morning that rounds found near the body of the suspected shooter in the attack on a Dallas ICE facility Wednesday morning “carried anti-ICE messages.” Considering how quickly a false narrative that a right-wing lunatic had killed Charlie Kirk spread, I wonder if authorities were eager to fill the vacuum with clear facts about the crime and likely motive.

And while everyone has the right to criticize our immigration polices and ICE is not above criticism, you start to wonder whether months and months of calling ICE agents “fascists” and “jackbooted thugs” are convincing left-wing nutjobs that this really is the time for violent resistance to the U.S. government. It’s not hard to find figures on the left arguing that “ICE agents deserve no privacy.” I’m not a particularly big fan of federal agents wearing masks as they perform their duties, but it’s undeniable that there are people out there who would like to harm ICE agents, who thus have a reasonable concern that exposure of their faces might make them easier targets.

A rare kudos to The Atlantic for running an article and a headline that left-of-center readers would prefer not to encounter: “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise: For the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right.”

And I think many conservatives will dispute Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe’s characterization of the right-wing violence that occurred this year:

This year, however, violence on the right has plummeted. Only one right-wing-terrorist incident occurred in the first six months of 2025: the June assassination of the Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband. This extraordinary drop-off is too recent to allow for any definitive explanations—and the number of terror incidents often fluctuates over short periods—but Trump’s reelection could be a key factor. His victory deflated election conspiracies that had once motivated many extremists.

Okay, except the perpetrator of the Hortman assassinations is more accurately characterized as a delusional maniac, not as someone driven by a right-wing political agenda:

In the letter, Boelter allegedly wrote that he had been secretly trained by the U.S. military and had participated in secret overseas missions “all in the line of what I thought was doing right and was in the best interest of the United States.” The letter claimed he had been “approached” by Gov. Tim Walz (D) and ordered to kill the state’s two U.S. senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, because “Tim wants to be senator.”

Considering how many progressives chose the more pleasant alternative realities where Kirk was killed by an “ultra-MAGA” or a “White Supremacist Gang Hit,” I think we’ll see a lot of denial that this perpetrator was doing so in the name of the left as well.