The new year brought twin terrorist attacks to American cities. Are left-wing and Islamist terrorism returning simultaneously?

On the Three Martini Lunch podcast, this year Greg Corombos and I made predictions for the new year, recorded a bit before Christmas. Greg and I decided we would each do three predictions, in increasing levels of implausibility.

This was supposed to be my most outlandish prediction of 2025:

Jim: I started thinking about terrorism — old fashioned, blowing stuff up, hijacking planes, you know, all that kind of stuff. And al-Qaeda is still out there, but they’re a shadow of their former selves, ISIS….

Islamist terror does not keep us awake at night the way it used to. So I’m actually not predicting that. But I wonder, particularly thinking about the assassination of Brian Thompson, late last year… My grim outlandish prediction is that by the end of 2025, there will have been a major terrorist attack, committed on Amer- on U.S. soil, against Americans, by some sort of left-wing terrorist group. Now, it might be a lone wolf. But I start to wonder if at some point, you will see like-minded angry people, who are angry about Trump’s election, they’re angry about the fact that Democrats are shut out. I kind of wonder how much they’ve had their hopes raised by Bernie Sanders, AOC, etcetera, and this belief that ‘oh, the socialist revolution is just around the corner!’ And it hasn’t happened.

They’ve had the bait and switch, and they’ve had Lucy and the football, so many times, that instead of saying, ‘you know what? I hate politics, I want to get into stamp collecting,’ or do something else with their lives. They’re full of rage and they’ve just looking for a chance — they’ve convinced themselves that shooting somebody or blowing something up will make the world a better place. ‘This will make them listen!’ I think the reaction to Brian Thompson late last year was really a dark and disturbing thing. It doesn’t take a large group to do something terrible. So my fear is that by the end of 2025 — as for the ramifications of this, I have no idea. I’m hoping the backlash against this kind of left-wing extremist groups would be harsh, but I don’t know. You always seem to find people who can find ways to justify it, and explain it away, make excuses for it, going back to the attempt to kill Republican congressmen at the softball field… There’s no shortage of this sort of thing, it’s been percolating. My fear is that by the end of this year, we’ll have some really terrible event, and that will be one of the big things we talk about in the year to come.

Happy new year, everybody!

Greg: That’s not the cheeriest, but I could potentially see that happening.

Now, as of this writing, we don’t know, with absolute certainty, the precise motivations of the perpetrators of the two New Year’s Day attacks. But we have some strong clues. The ISIS flag in Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s truck certainly points to Islamist extremism being a potent factor in his heinous acts. And as laid out in today’s Morning Jolt, attempting to detonate a truck bomb in a vehicle made by Elon Musk’s company in front of a hotel with Donald Trump’s name on it certainly seems like a political message.

I didn’t want that prediction to be right, and I never thought it could come true so quickly.